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Raspberry Pi Accessories and Power Questions

e14 Contributor

Just got my order confirmation today and UPS shipping says it will be here on Thursday. Leaves me only two days to get everything I need so I'm looking to buy everything as soon as possible. However Im concerned about the power these things can handle and what kind of power supply to use. I read something about 700 mA but I'm not as tech savvy in electronics as some people. I have extra micro USB chargers for my Droid 2 phone as well as the ones all of my family has. Are these capable of the 700 mA needed? Or do I need a larger/smaller power supply in order to properly run the RPi without having shortages or overloading the board? I haven't checked but my TV might even have a USB port would that be good enough?

 

Which leads me to my next question about the accessories. I plan on adding a wireless USB mouse/keyboard combo as well as USB wifi dongle, and maybe a portable external hard drive but at bare minimum an 8 gb flash drive. Definitely going to buy a USB hub to accomodate the need for more USB ports but I don't want to overload the RPi and break the thing.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated and feel free to post links to some of the accessories you got for your RPi. Interested to see what kind of mouse/keyboard combos and wireless adapters you guys went with.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    Have given up on the wireless adapter with the RTL8188CU chipset for the time being, I found an old one with a RT2070 chipset that I got working with very little effort

     

    Basically all I needed to do was install the Ralink Firmware, Wireless Tools and Gnome Network Manager.

     

    See links for info - http://wiki.debian.org/rt2870sta#Squeeze  http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#GNOME

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    To Andrew Morey:

     

    I am also in the US and was looking at the same hub you purchased when I came across this thread; the hub has good reviews and is cheap. Does it work properly with the raspberry Pi, in particular with the wifi and keyboard/mouse both attached to the hub, because that is my plan as well? That combination seems to be a problem for a lot of people.

     

    My other parts are different. I have a Microsoft Desktop 3000 wireless setup that someone gave me last year. I have a TP-Link TL-WN722N wifi adapter (really like it) and plan on ordering a Medialink MWN-USB150N adapter as well; I plan on testing each with the pi (Although the TL-WN722N) is already listed on the wiki as a working model and the Medialink appears to have the same chipset as another tested wifi device. One wifi dongel will go on my desktop and the other one on the pi. I am also leaning towards a Transcend card as well, maybe a class 8gb or 16gb class10 as I see others have successfully used these.

     

    My pi arrived yesterday, but I will probably wait until I get a case before I hook it up. My years of working as an engineer with electronics in production lines just won't allow me to lay the circuit board on a table.  I am thinking about the modmypi case which I really like, but I would not see it until the end of June.

     

    Thanks.

  • in reply to pjc123

    I never actually purchased it, I thought about it but in my original post I mentioned that I was thinking about buying that USB hub. But I figured I was using a single USB to power the wireless keyboard and mouse, and the other onboard USB from the Pi would be used for the Wifi dongle. I know that there may be a limitation to the Pi's power especially when trying to connect the USB wifi adapter over a distance. But the USB hub may come at a later date when I've got the Pi working and demand more from it.

     

    Mr P I'm sad to see you've given up on the RTL8188 based adapter, I haven't gotten around to working on it yet I've been busy the past few days. Glad your other adapter works nicely though. How are the internet speeds over wireless?

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    I've had no ends of problems with Realtek based wifi adapters. Every time i get the realtekfirmware loaded I get continuous series of NYET/NACK/ACK (or something like it) debug message that cripple the Pi. This only happens when the firmware is loaded.

     

    I've ordered a Netgear wna1100 from eBay as the wiki says it works and it doesn't use Realtek.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    Andrew, I havent actually done any speetests as such but it seems very useable, obviously the heavier the page content the less the pi likes to load it quickly.

    also I havent totally given up on the realtek adapter, just needed to get some wireless working as the RPI is sat in a room far away from the router.

     

    All in All for a board and OS thats still being developed I am more than happy with its performance so far.