Raspberry Pi 3 kit

ssfc72 · February 07, 2017, 10:41:00 AM

I got a small handheld Rii mini i8, combination keyboard/touchpad and tried using it with my Pi 3. It works very well. the Rii is very small, about the same size as a small gaming handheld controller.

the Rii comes with its own micro wifi dongle, which I plugged into the Pi, to get the Rii to work. I initially was mistaken in thinking the Rii usb dongle was a bluetooth dongle.
The Rii has an internal lithium battery that you have to charge up with the supplied usb cable.

So I am typing this message and internet browsing, with the Pi, using this handheld Rii. :-)

fox · February 07, 2017, 12:35:44 PM

What are you using for a monitor and how is it connected to your pi?

ssfc72 · February 07, 2017, 01:50:45 PM

I am using the 20 inch monitor from my desktop computer. The monitor has a dvi input connector so I bought a HDMI to to dvi adapter, from PC paramedics in Peterborough, to enable the HDMI from the pi, to connect to the monitor.

I also can connect the pi, to my 40" HD TV, which has HDMI inputs.

Jason · February 07, 2017, 07:21:49 PM

Cool, Bill! How do you like the keyboard for typing?

ssfc72 · February 07, 2017, 08:24:03 PM

The keyboard is good for typing. There seems to be a fair amount of travel, to click each key, so speed typing may suffer a bit.
The touchpad is very small but is very nicely sensitive. You have to take a number of swipes to move across or down a browser page but this sensitivity, to travel the cursor, I think might be adjustable.

The unit I purchased has backlighted keys. :-)

bobf · February 08, 2017, 12:12:36 PM

Will do, Scott. I want to use it on Raspbian to set up a full Kodi box... Should be doable - anybody know if it'll stream adequately for 1080p and 4K? Like Mike said at the meeting, it might take an Odroid - or a Banana Pi, or something with a little more horsepower. But then, it's initial design spec was as a platform to get your head around programming, so it's a little off the mark, but I expect that's the case with about 93% of RPis out there today (but I could be wrong...)

ssfc72 · February 08, 2017, 03:57:40 PM

Okey Dockey, I can try to install Kodi on the Pi 3 and see how it works with my 40" HD TV. :-)

I don't think there would be any 4K movies being served through Kodi, though. 1080p media, might be streamed but I am not sure how you would determine if the Kodi streaming was 720p or 1080p.

bobf · February 10, 2017, 06:07:47 PM

The screen-shotting I've seen on YouTube shows the resolution at the bottom of the screen, though that may be specific to some add-on, rather than a Kodi thing...?

ssfc72 · February 11, 2017, 06:07:25 AM

I have the OpenElec which is running Kodi ver 16.1, running on my Pi 3.
It streams 1080p movies (I am going by the media title, which shows 1080p) very nicely and I am using the wifi of the Pi to connect to my router.
I am sending the hdmi to a 20" computer monitor. I will try it on my 40" hd tv, next time.

Bill

Quote from: bobf on February 08, 2017, 12:12:36 PM
Will do, Scott. I want to use it on Raspbian to set up a full Kodi box... Should be doable - anybody know if it'll stream adequately for 1080p and 4K? Like Mike said at the meeting, it might take an Odroid - or a Banana Pi, or something with a little more horsepower. But then, it's initial design spec was as a platform to get your head around programming, so it's a little off the mark, but I expect that's the case with about 93% of RPis out there today (but I could be wrong...)

ssfc72 · February 12, 2017, 08:18:07 PM

OpenElec Kodi 16 is working well, streaming HD movies to my 40" HD TV.

The Rii R8i mini keyboard/touchpad works very nicely at operating the Kodi menu. :-)

Bill

fox · February 21, 2017, 01:56:00 PM

I picked up the Creatron RPi 3 "kit" on Saturday during our geek trip. It isn't really a kit; you just pick out the parts you want. I got the Pi, a small enclosure, a fan, heat sink kit and a 2.5 amp power supply. I had a bit of trouble assembling the enclosure and mounting the fan, as nothing came with instructions. Fortunately, I was able to find photos and videos of RPi additions close enough to mine to figure it out. Although I didn't buy a preloaded sd card, I had a 16 gb one already. I downloaded the Noobs software and had no problem transferring it to my sd or ultimately, installing my distros. I chose to install Raspbian and LibreElec, figuring that the Raspian would be good for more general stuff and the LibreElec for the media server I'm trying to use it with. Noobs nicely installed both in one try, as well as a nice grub (?) menu to choose between them at boot up. Raspbian needed a lot of updates, which I tried implementing with Synaptic, which I had to install first. Unfortunately, it froze during the installation, and wouldn't reboot thereafter. So I reinstalled everything from scratch and this time did it "properly" using apt. I still have one hitch - my zagg wireless bluetooth keyboard was recognized but not functional in Raspbian. (I'm going to try this in LibreElec later today.) My only other complaint is the fan, which is very noisy and on all the time. Turns out that I shouldn't need it in a media server, but if you know of a program to control its speed, let me know. The other thing I need to decide about is what the media will be stored in. It's possible that an RPi 3 with my power supply might be able to run a 2.5" usb drive; or not. I'm going to try that first, as I would like to avoid having to buy a powered external drive or even a powered usb hub if I can. Alternatively, Bob pointed me to the Western Digital website, as they make a low-consumption drive/enclosure combination that is meant to run on the Pi. I'll certainly consider this if Plan A doesn't work.

fox · February 21, 2017, 06:42:17 PM

Update: I got my Zagg bluetooth keyboard working with both LibreElec and Raspian on the pi. I unplugged the fan and experienced no ill effects with any software I played with. I tried plugging in three different usb 2 external 2.5" drives, and all worked on the pi without any external power for these drives. Similarly, a 32 gig usb pendrive worked. So I'm now asking myself whether it's really necessary to get a special external drive to connect to the pi to hold my media.

I did experience a few problems that I have yet to solve. The first is that my iPhone could connect to the pi via bluetooth, but I couldn't get the software to work with the iPhone program I tried. The second is that some videos and even whole video channels didn't seem to work on Kodi running in Raspbian, including the Linux Action Show on youtube. These channels worked OK in LibreElec, which is running a newer version of Kodi. More troubleshooting to do, but results are encouraging so far.

ssfc72 · February 21, 2017, 08:13:03 PM

Neat! I didn't know that NOOBS would set up a dual boot of 2 RPi OS's.

Quote from: fox on February 21, 2017, 01:56:00 PM
LibreElec, figuring that the Raspian would be good for more general stuff and the LibreElec for the media server I'm trying to use it with. Noobs nicely installed both in one try, as well as a nice grub (?) menu to choose between them at boot up. Raspbian needed a lot of updates, which I tried implementing with Synaptic, which I had to install first. Unfortunately, it froze during the installation, and wouldn't reboot thereafter. So I reinstalled everything from scratch

ssfc72 · February 21, 2017, 08:20:23 PM

Mike commented, on our road trip on Saturday, that he would use a cell phone app to navigate Kodi on his RPi, I hadn't even thought of that possibility.

Turns out there is an Android app by the name of Kore, to use with navigating the Kodi media player, using an Android phone.
Kore works very well for me, with my Moto G 3G phone. :-)

fox · February 22, 2017, 01:33:43 PM

I've been reading up on the internet about storage options. The most elegant is the Western Digital pidrive, which you can buy in Canada from BuyaPi.ca. The price of the 375 gb drive plus cable is $CA 55; not much different from the cost of buying it directly from WD in the USA. The advantage is lower power consumption than a conventional drive and easy setup; you can even buy an enclosure that holds both the pi and the drive, and a power cable that powers both if you need extra power. But the power is the question - does one really need extra power to run a conventional 2.5" external drive in an enclosure? My reading of this review is that you don't for low power use like a media server. I also wonder if you can't just use a high capacity usb pendrive to put your media on, and perhaps even run the operating system from. The BerryBoot software that comes with the WD pidrive is available gratis online, and it apparently makes it easy to install the OS(es) on the drive instead of the SD card (except for the /boot portion, which needs to be on the card and is installed there automatically). The advantage of doing this is for the greater speed of the drive (vs SD card), and also to minimize wear of the card due to writes, and finally, it affords the possibility of making a swap partition to extend the 1 GB memory of the pi. As I have already shown, the two external drives I tried so far both mount on the pi without any additional power. Question is whether they will work OK if the OS(es) are running on them and you are using the pi as a low-taxing device like a media server. Comments?