Should i consider getting a pi?
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@cyperghost You forgot one for a Robotics build. I have a rover built that runs RetroPie as the OS distro. All I have to do is grab up my robot as is rolls by, turn off the battery pack for the motors and plug in a controller and HDMI cable and I have all my games ready to play.
Good place to start for robotics on the Pi: http://camjam.me/?page_id=1035
Includes source. -
@PorkBeans The only extra hardware you NEED is an SD card, HDMI cable, and USB controller. I used a standard wired Xbox 360 controller as it has plenty of buttons.
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YES YOU SHOULD! It's the best gadget I ever bought, seriously I have a PS4 and I haven't touch it for months now since I spend so much time playing retro games. I was looking for some device which allows you to play old games I almost bought a GPD XD2 and before I bought it I found an article about RetroPie. So this was a "shut up and take my money" meme moment.
It also runs Kodi which is a huge plus for me. You don't need much hardware, if you're going to use it for gaming you just need a USB controller, power supply, network cable, SD card and a HDMI cable, a case for the Pi would be good too.
I might get an another one to run an IRC MP3 server on.
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Curiously RetroPie is making me more involved with programming than gamming.
Newcommers, wait! It doesn't mean that RetroPie requires programming skills! You can play your [G]old videogames with no programming knowledge! Let me explain my statement telling my love story with RetroPie...
Before this forum, I was using RetroPie (since 2013) only for gamming.
When I arrived at this forum I made a few "feature requests" and some guys said something like "Hey, we work in RetroPie at our free time, and we plan to implement other stuff first. Don't expect to get these features implemented soon. Maybe it's better to implement it yourself.".
Well, I know how to code in bash and RetroPie is 97% bash scripts. Let's try it!
Then I ran into a small issue: the RetroPie code lacks documentation. I posted about it and concluded that I have to read the (almost) entire code.
The funny thing is that as I read the code, I learn some cool bash tricks. And it gave me a lot of ideas to develop some useful tools at work.
My job has nothing to do with Linux and/or programming. Actually I'm forced to use Windows here, but, fortunately, Cygwin exists.
From time to time I need to make some different queries at company's intranet pages. In practice it means: 1) open firefox, 2) type the desired URL (or click some links), 3) fill some forms, 4) click submit button, 5) search the info I want in the page returned... Thanks to Cygwin, shell utils (sed, grep, etc.), netcat, wget, and RetroPie's code inspiration, I made a bunch of scripts that can replace all the steps above with a single command line.
All this ends up being a bit ironic: the RetroPie guys has other priorities so I try to implement some features myself - to implement it I need to read the code - reading the code gives me good ideas to implement at work - the development of these ideas at work becomes my priority...
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I forgot to mention that when I'm actually coding RetroPie stuff and need to get/set some, let's say, "internal data", and don't find a way to do it, I bother @Buzz to solve this. And he usually solves! He really deserves to be mentioned somewhere! :-)
BTW: @Zigurana posted something in this regard here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2708/what-s-the-date-again
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@wmcclelion said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
@cyperghost You forgot one for a Robotics build. I have a rover built that runs RetroPie as the OS distro. All I have to do is grab up my robot as is rolls by, turn off the battery pack for the motors and plug in a controller and HDMI cable and I have all my games ready to play.
Good place to start for robotics on the Pi: http://camjam.me/?page_id=1035
Includes source.Hey that's pretty cool. Right I forget the robots based on RPi. It's easy to attach some ultrasonic sensors and read out distance data. So you just need to attach a LCD-panel to your robot so you can "go" retrogaming. And if you start to play Pokemon? How do you call it?
Retro Pokemon Go! -
@meleu Thank you for your efforts and energy for this project.
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@PorkBeans For me it's one and only one reason for getting a PI compared to any other computer - It just runs, runs and runs.
No anti-virus, no system updates, no restarts, no crashes. No bloatware, no drivers...
It's like a purpose build always on system.
It's 100% quiet, no fans, no HDD spinning.
It's low power, mine consumes 8W when on and 0.2W when sleeping.
The community around the PI and its applications is great, people are experienced, willing to help and happy.
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As i said, i will definetly be getting one :)
Now i just need to convince my father to do this one with me, as i dont think he will be very convinced but i will try.
And about Amazon Echo, the article someone posted was about using them together. I dont have an echo. 200$...And robots... portable pi? HELL YEAH opens Blender and starts modelling
And btw, the kit you linked, does it include some sort of way to control the robot with like a remote, controller, or such?
Thanks in advance -
If you like fiddling w/ hardware, if you're into computers, if you wanna learn something about Linux: buy one. Extra stuff you'll need are a plastic case (approx. $7) and, like the others said, a hdmi cable, a good power supply (this is less trivial than you might think), etc. etc. I bought this cheap power adapter for my Pi 1B. But the Pi 3 needs more power!
Good luck w/ convincing your dad and with using your Pi! :-)
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@cyperghost said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
@meleu Thank you for your efforts and energy for this project.
You're welcome, but I think I don't deserve all this gratitude. :-)
I'm just an average RetroPie user... The credit goes to the core developers. -
@Riverstorm said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
I think it would be interesting to know a bit (even if only RetroPie related) about the behind the scenes group! :)
There is a nice interview segment on The Pi Podcast, episode 13 (interview starts around 14:00.
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Great interview. Thanks for linking that.
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@meleu You are much too humble :)
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And robots... portable pi? HELL YEAH opens Blender and starts modelling
And btw, the kit you linked, does it include some sort of way to control the robot with like a remote, controller, or such?
Thanks in advanceIt doesn't directly, but I have modified python code you can connect to via ssh or a custom VB.Net app and drive the robot.
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@glennlake said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
If your married you can setup the kodi as a media center if you need a plus to sell it to your spouse.
This worked for me. I have two Pi's now! Of course, my wife played a ton of SNES when she was younger so the 2nd Pi wasn't as hard to sell to her as I thought it was going to be. The first one was a no brainer. A 50$US HTPC? The hard part was convincing her that it would be running linux.
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Ive done some research on Kodi.... what does it do?
Its a media center, i got it, but from what i got i need to transfer my files in, right? Well, i dont feel like its worth it i can just plug my drive to the TV and watch from there -
@caver01 said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
@Riverstorm said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
I think it would be interesting to know a bit (even if only RetroPie related) about the behind the scenes group! :)
There is a nice interview segment on The Pi Podcast, episode 13 (interview starts around 14:00.
Thanks Caver, this was interesting. It nice to kind hear their thoughts on the project as a whole, hurdles, how RetroPie was born, controllers, platforms, etc. I recognized Herb right away from other tutorial video's but it was a first hearing Buzz and Florian. I think it was quite useful and hope they continue to do Podcasts. I think it's really interesting knowing the guys on the backend. :)
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@PorkBeans said in Should i consider getting a pi?:
Its a media center, i got it, but from what i got i need to transfer my files in, right?
You might want to dig a little deeper. There's almost nothing related to audio/video playback that it can't do.
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Installed on PC and checked it out. Its awesome! But i wont be getting a pi for it since my internet cant handle this. 400kbps download speed :/
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