Raspberry Pi

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
I have made it known to the family I'd like a Raspberry Pi for Christmas. I think the kids and Anne are splitting it between them. This means that I could go for the best option and possibly some add ons.
I have a few ideas for it but I would like to ask those in the know if some of my ideas would work.
Well here goes.
Can you add and use a Hard disc drive to increase the memory?
Would it be able to store and act as a server for music?
Recently there was talk about turning it into an FM TX with RDS etc, I'd like to feed it to my aerial system but the harmonics worry me, would proper filtering be OK or should I forget about that.

Has anyone else used the Pi and for what uses and what projects have you done?
Lastly, is it easy to work with and is there tutorials.

[Ed_Dinning]

Hi Trevor, lots of stuff on the Elektor site about these and they also do some good books about them.

Ed

[Murphyv310]

Cheers for that Ed.
I'll have a look.

[Nick]

I mainly use my Pis for running Max2Play as the clients for my Vortexbox media server. Some have DAC hats, some have DAC/digital amp hats - the hats are from IQaudIO. I also have one with a small tube amp on it as a headphone amplifier...

I really like them as a good solid well-supported SBC. I have also used them to turn dumb flatscreens into "wallboards" to cross fade between different web pages showing the statuses of various projects... They are very flexible.

I just wish that they supported PoE natively - would make them easier to use in remote locations...

[ed731pdh]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/

Download the magazines, 62 issues so far and ten specials.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Thanks for the link, I've been downloading some but a specific question and the answer I can't find.
I'll ask here and see if it's a possibility.
Recently I've been playing around with other obsolete TV standards due to Peter Scott and others using graphics cards being able to work on lower line standards by playing around with modelines.
Now I know the Pi has HDMI and also composite video but is composite developed in a dedicated chip or is generated like a VGA, I suspect not but I was hoping to use the Pi for this purpose amongst other things. Maybe a silly question but one I had to ask.

[Nick]

The video on the Pi is generated within the SoC (System on a Chip), a Broadcom BCM2837 in the Pi3. The SoC contains a VideoCore 4 GPU implemented as both silicon & firmware - some codecs are managed by the CPU rather than the GPU. The same GPU is used on all Pi variants, even though the SoC used to implement the GPU varies.

So, the short answer is that you have no real access to the low-level on this stuff.

[Murphyv310]

Thanks Nick for the info.
Now beginning to think that the Pi may not be for me.

[ppppenguin]

It's very likely that the RPI's PAL/NTSC coder is preset to those specific timings with little room for reprogramming.

Some years ago both David Robinson and I tried (separately and not known to each other until afterwards) to make an Analog Devices ADV7171 coder chip do NTSC405. It's fairly programmable, the subcarrier was no problem, but getting the H timings to work was a challenge. DR succeeded, I didn't.

Once you've got programmable logic available you can do just about anything. Darryl has amply demonstrated this with the Aurora range of converters. I knocked up a simple 625>405 converter using a Xilinx Spartan 2 series FPGA that was on a board designed for a client. Generating 240, 180 or any other standard would have been pretty simple too.

[Murphyv310]

Thanks Jeffrey.

To be fair my old Multi standard Aurora does everything I need but I did wonder if the Pi was capable. I'm not in a financial position to splash out on a WC and in reality I couldn't justify it.
Time to get back to the PC and see if we can edit the mode-lines, firstly I'll need to get it running Windows 7 though.