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  • Author Author: element14Dave
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 1007 views
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  • Comments 9 comments
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Dave's Most Excellent (hopefully) Pi Adventure

element14Dave

For those of you who may not know me, my name is ,  I am the Community Support Lead for element14, previous to this role I was a Customer Service Manager, a Sales Manager and a few years ago got my feet wet in electronics as an internal Sales Rep for our North American brand, Newark element14 . My previous work experience was mostly in sales and retail management, this is relevant to this blog only because I wanted to give some perspective to any who may read this that my back ground...not one shred of it, does not have anything to do with programming, making or hacking.

 

I have been watching on the sidelines into the Maker Community for the last couple of years, reading about it on the community and broadcasting out via our social media channels the ideas and the realization of those ideas of other people. Well its time for me to get off the sidelines and into the game as it were image . Later this week I will be placing an order for my first Raspberry Pi (no better place to start than a board specifically designed for children to understand..right?) I cannot solder. A year ago I only knew Python as something I have a childhood fear over (a subject for another blog) and a breadboard is something I have only used in the kitchen. 

 

My goal in sharing this out here in the community is two fold...one, to really get a feel for being a participant in the community and a customer, to understand it and you better so I can be better at what I do, and two, because I will need help, and probably a lot of it!

 

So my first question our there to the community member is this...what should I get? What project should I start off with?

 

I am a movie buff and would like to convert my media collection (300-400 DVDs)  into a digital collection, but I am wondering if that may be a little too ambitious for my first..well anything.

 

Also in case anyone would like to know, this is not sponsored by element14, nor will I be getting stock position ahead of anyone...I am just a regular customer on this one image

 

Dave

  • I have a XBMC setup with a Linux computer running Samba (could be a Raspberry Pi as well, but in my case I had a home linux server anyway) and then Raspberry Pis in the other rooms running RaspBMC / OpenElec - (both XBMC distros for the Raspberry Pi).

     

    I have a 3GB USB drive, whilst the drive I have is capable of USB 3, if you are connecting it direct to the Raspberry Pi then it is only capable of USB 2, so no need to get anything more than USB 2 unless you are thinking about using it for other purposes in future.

     

    As well as films I also have photos and music on the drive which can also be accessed from XBMC and any PCs on the home network.

     

    One thing I did experience is that due to interference I get a very poor wireless signal, so I switched to data over ethernet (Devolo) plugs. These are "up-to" 200M (but only running at maximum 100M to individual devices as they are connected to 100M ethernet). These are much better for streaming video than wireless in my particular setup.

  • Hi Dave,

     

    Another idea that you might like to consider for storage is if you have any sort of a home network to use a NAS or something similar with a DLNA server to serve up your movies.

    Then you would need an equivalent on the Pi to read from your media server but that would also free up the USB that the external is attached to because everything would come through the network.

     

    I have just read your post on the MediaPi and my own Pi just arrived today wo will look forward to setting up something this week

     

    Hope you are having fun

     

    Matt

     

    PS My first attempt used a BeagleBoard xM so I am looking forward to the community support of the Pi keep it up

  • Thanks Drew, I purchased a 2TB External HD with usb2/usb3 connectivity. the cloud storage solutions I researched were expensive (some $20 a month) and would be much slower. Everything is on its way. Should be fun!

  • in reply to element14Dave

    Yeah, you can use a USB 2.0 external HD.  XBMC should recognize and mount it automatically.   As for cloud storage, I'm not all that familiar with the options.  It did find this guide to using Amazon S3 storage as a filesystem.  So in theory, you could host your file on S3.  But for best performance, I think though you would probably want to use an external HD or a share from another computer in your home.

  • in reply to bad_boy_y

    After doing a little bit of research, I think the Tb hard drive are the way to go for both speed and cost. Ill configure one SD to xbmc as the main media center and use another to work and any other projects I want to tinker with...great advice @bad_boy-y - I  am excited to get started...but dreading converting all of my  dvd's to a digital format to put on the hard drives...yikes.