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comment by veen
veen  ·  2902 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 21, 2016

I got a giftcard as a small Christmas bonus at work and I'm gonna spend it on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a small screen. At Dutch train stations, one often finds these information signs:

It'd be cool (and nerdy, I'm not denying that here) to build it myself so I can always know when the next train goes - I travel by train quite a lot. There's an API for the train times and I can probably build a script that fetches that info every few minutes or so. Anyone have some good resources for learning to work with Raspbian?





veen  ·  2892 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Update 2: Doneski!

veen  ·  2899 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Update: Tiny hubski!

dublinben  ·  2901 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I actually recommend spending slightly more money on something like a Beaglebone Black so you can run standard Debian, or any other standard ARM distro. Raspberry Pi requires too many specific hacks to be easy to use.

veen  ·  2901 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I can see that, but because of import costs the Black is twice the cost of a Pi. Plus, hacking around is part of the fun.

dublinben  ·  2901 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If the cost difference is that much, that's pretty reasonable. By hacking, I just mean that the Pi isn't actually supported by the mainline kernel of mainstream distributions. It requires specific proprietary firmware to boot that will limit you to only running specialized operating systems like "rasbpian."

veen  ·  2901 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I figured as much. The Pi to me is more an 'Arduino with added Linux' than a 'PC with less functionality'. I also haven't done anything with Linux so far so I'm more than happy with a proprietary-ish kernel.