4GB Too Small For Raspberry Pi

Just in case anyone makes this mistake too...

I brought a 4GB SD card for my Raspberry Pi but after trying to clone the Git project I've been planning. I'm about to buy a 32GB card but I'm a bit sad that I wont get my project tested tonight :(

How to start the Raspberry Pi without an HDMI Screen (or no screen at all)

I just downloaded the debian squeeze image and copied it onto an SD card. Then I realised I had no HDMI screen as I always use my laptop. I thought I'd have to get one but thought it looked a bit expensive so I thought there may be a way to start it without a screen at all!!

From:
http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/05/enable-secure-shell-ssh-on-your-raspberry-pi/

To enable SSH automatically every time the Pi starts you need to :

• Prepare an SD card with the Debian “Squeeze” image
• Insert the SD card in your PC
• Rename ” boot_enable_ssh.rc” as “boot.rc”
• Eject the SD card and insert into your Pi

When the Pi boots SSH is enabled by default.

All I needed to do was turn on the RPi, log into my router and wait for the RPi's IP to turn up. I then brought up putty and logged straight in using the credentials provided from where I downloaded the debian image.


I'm really glad I managed to start using my Raspberry Pi without having to buy a new monitor/TV!!!

Raspberry pi unboxing

Below are the photos of my BRAND NEW RASPBERRY PI!! Very excited to get this little thing up and running. First thing I need to do is set up an SD card with the OS. 

For anything who read my previous post... RS Components were very quick to send me a new one after I opened my empty box :(     The only issue is I didnt see it sitting where my house mates put in on the kitchen table so its been sat there a week!

Raspberry Pi Empty Unboxing

Well the time has come for me to unbox my Raspberry Pi - it arrived earlier than expected! Unfortunately though I have had a bit of bad luck. I'll spare you the photos, but basically I unboxed two bits of foam with no computer hidden inside them!

That's right - an empty box!!

After looking around on Google it seems I'm not the only one, but I sure am disappointed! To be fair to RS Components (from which I brought it) I contacted them by email on a Sunday evening and got a response within 20 minutes... There should be another one in the post for me arriving soon.

If you order a Raspberry Pi and get an empty box simply send an email to 

Bray, Mike Mike.Bray@rs-components.com

My email:

Hi,

I ordered my Raspberry Pi and it arrived today, but the box was empty. The box was not tampered with as far as I could tell. The security seals were still intact.

My invoice number is: ************

After looking through the forums (http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=7194&start=25) it seems that this is a known issue.

Please send my raspberry pi to the following address as soon as possible:

*****

*****
*****

London!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Hugh

His response:

Hi Hugh,

Thanks for letting me know.  I’ve reported this to the Pi team, and asked them to issue you with a replacement as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Mike

Although disappointed I am somewhat impressed by the fast reply. I will post again when it arrives - hopefully it'll be better news next time round.

Raspberry Pi Project

You should all of heard of the Raspberry Pi by now, but in case you haven't head over to   http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs for a preview. As a summary: A Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized  Linux-powered computer that costs between $25 and $35. That price tag makes it VERY interesting to me.

Although the Raspberry Pi is designed for educational purposes there is a growing community using them for projects ranging from home automation to robotics. Recently I have been writing a program that scrapes data from both websites and xml feeds, aggregates that data, and does some useful things with it... I ordered a Raspberry Pi about 6 weeks ago (due to arrive next month) and I intend to use it to run my web scraping program.

As my project has grown I have had to distribute the scraping work and much of the calculations across multiple AWS servers while keeping the database on a single server. The database server I will scale upwards onto larger hardware due to the high write to read ratio (yes more writes), but the scraping work I hope to distribute across a small farm of Raspberry Pi computers back home. If this works I should be able to massively cut down my AWS bill.

I am yet to find out whether the Raspberry Pi will be able to run my scraping program in just 256MB of RAM, but if all goes well I will be buying at least 10 of these little gems!

I'll post again when my Raspberry Pi arrives.

Amazon EC2 Micro Instance and Stolen CPU / Throttling

Last week I started using EC2 for more than just testing a few things and found that my micro instance was for some reason running incredibly slowly. It took me a little while to find out why:

Amazon's description for micro instances is as follows: 

Micro instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to increase CPU capacity in short bursts when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that require additional compute cycles periodically.

The description doesn't make it obvious that short bursts can only be about 10 seconds long. After that the instance slows to a snail's pace! This can be explained by having a quick look at 'top'.

The 98.0%st refers to the 98% of CPU time that is reallocated by the host server and not available to your micro instance. This means that after a 'short burst' your instance can only use 2% of its CPU.

The only solution is to upgrade to a small instance or above - this seems to be Amazon's way of persuading people to pay higher fees for their servers. Micro instances can be good for certain uses, but for consistent performance you'll have to fork out the extra fees for a bigger server.