Hasta La Gadget!

Making the Raspberry Pi affordable involved some tough calls, including the omission of MPEG-2 decoding. Licensing fees alone for the video software would have boosted the board’s price by approximately 10 percent. Now, after many have made media centers with the hardware, the foundation behind the project has whipped up a solution to add the missing codec. For $3.16, users can purchase an individual MPEG-2 license for each of their boards on the organization’s online store. Partial to Microsoft’s VC-1 standard? Rights to using Redmond’s codec can be purchased for $1.58. H.264 encoding is also in the cards since OpenMax components needed to develop applications with the functionality are now enabled by default in the device’s latest firmware. With CEC support thrown into the Raspbmc, XBian and OpenELEC operating systems, a single IR remote can control a Raspberry Pi, a TV and other connected gadgets. If you’re ready to load up your Pi with its newfound abilities, hit the source link below.

Update: The Raspberry Pi Foundation let us know that US customers won’t have to pay sales tax, which means patrons will only be set back $3.16 for MPEG-2 and $1.58 for VC-1 support, not $3.79 and $1.90 for the respective licenses. We’ve updated the post accordingly.

Filed under: Misc

Raspberry Pi lands MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding through personal licenses, H.264 encoding and CEC tag along originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Aug 2012 07:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Taking long exposure photographs at night and painting within them using an iPad may be old hat, but building your own light painting rig? That could earn you some serious geek cred, and according to Adafruit, it isn’t even all that hard. In a new walkthrough, the team fashioned such a contraption using a Raspberry Pi, a python script with under 60 lines of code, some open source software and a handful of electronic components. Not satisfied with the typical light wand, they decided to spice things up with a circular fixture built from PVC pipes and a hula hoop to hold the ribbon of LEDs. After being attached to a bike and paraded around at night, it created the 3D effect in the masterpiece above. If you’re itching to make your own works of art, check out Adafruit’s tutorial at the source link below.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Adafruit builds Raspberry Pi-powered light painting rig, takes trippy photos originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 03:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Raspberry Pi is already considered a hacker’s paradise. However, that assumes that owners have all the software they need to start in the first place. Adafruit wants to give the process a little nudge through its Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro. The software includes a customized distribution of Raspbian, Occidentalis, that either turns on or optimizes SSHD access, Bonjour networking, WiFi adapter support and other hack-friendly tools. The build further rolls in Hexxeh’s firmware and a big, pre-built 4GB SD card image. Before you start frantically clicking the download link, be aware that the “educational” title doesn’t refer to a neophyte’s playground — Adafruit still assumes you know enough about Linux and Raspberry Pi units to be productive (or dangerous). Anyone who was already intrigued by the Raspberry Pi by itself, though, might appreciate what happens when it’s tossed into a fruit salad.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Software

Adafruit launches Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro, hastens our hacking originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Aug 2012 19:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well known ChromiumOS developer Hexxeh has been fiddling around with the Raspberry Pi since its debut and his latest experiment is a beta version of the Chromium browser, ready to run on Raspbian images. While it’s not the full Chromium OS (that’s still under development) it should help ease the pain of browsing the web on one of the $35 Broadcom-powered units. It still requires quite a bit of horsepower however, so overclocking your Raspberry Pi and using a fast USB stick or SD card for storage is advised, hit the source link below for more instructions on downloading and running the 35MB~ package.

Filed under: Software

Chromium browser for Raspberry Pi beta available originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Jul 2012 23:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’d been frustrated thanks to all the Raspberries having been picked, and had even considered the bitter taste of other fruit, there’s hope for you yet. The tiny computer’s maker has just announced that production is now at 4,000 units per day, and the previous restriction of one purchase per person has been lifted. Good news. In addition to this is the announcement of a new camera board in the works. The 5-megapixel module (as expected, dropping a few notches from the 14MP prototype) is expected to cost around $20-$25, and be available in around three months. So now you can have your fill of the sweet little berries and look forward to your next upgrade too. Now you just need to think of a suitably sweet application for it.

Continue reading Raspberry Pi production ramped up to 4,000 per day, 5MP camera module on its way (video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Raspberry Pi production ramped up to 4,000 per day, 5MP camera module on its way (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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