I decided my previous posts just would not cut it. So here we go, a full documentation of "Building the Beast".
The plan of action is to build a MAME and XBMC solution with a monitoring system using the Raspberry Pi camera. The Pi Camera will have a web interface to view the images, and if that is not possible then we will be setting up a VNC server.
In this post we will focus on Occidentalis, the educational distro for the Raspberry Pi.
First a bit of a background on Occidentalis:
Occidentalis is the educational distribution for the Raspberry Pi, developed by Adafruit.
It enables out of the box support for i2c, avahi, and many hardware possibilities. Because we will be constructing the Adafruit LCD Positive plate later, this will require me to get out my soldering iron and show off my terrible skills.
It is useful that i2c is available straight away, becuase we do not need to enable it later in the project, it is already there for us.
I downloaded Occidentalis and unzipped it. Using Win32diskImager I formatted the included 8gb SD card with it. (I cant find the 4gb XBMC card, but it does not really matter).
When the SD card had finished writing, I inserted it into the pi, connected everything and booted up.
I understand that most of the blog so far has been pictures and you like pictures, but we need to get down and dirty with configuring wlan0.
At the moment we have it preconfigured to search for DHCP on 255.255.255.255, but my Subnet is 255.255.255.0. The entire configuration is wrong anyway, so lets update it.
Fire up nano on the file /etc/network/interfaces.
Setting up connection to my home wifi was easy, in Occidentalis you just have to change the SSID and password. I rebooted to see if it worked, and to my surprise I had internet access!
Now all we have to do is head over to PUTTY and do some work there.
Next time, we will be installing XBMC and get it to work with our media share.