I tried out a few more projects with my Raspi. First was to convert Raspi to a portable bluetooth speakers. I used the steps in this article. Initially I had a problem with PulseAudio where only playing the music as root worked but that some how got fixed when I tried various suggestions on the web. I could play the music from iMac but it used to have stability problems. Not sure if it was because I also did ssh from iMac and there is a second connection. Or may be powering the USB for Wifi and the Bluetooth for music was simply too much. I wanted to try it on iphone but iphone didn’t recognize the bluetooth device.
I also gave the Shairport a try to do the AirPlay. That worked very well and could stream music from iMac and iPhone. However when I used AirAudio and tried from an Android phone, it didn’t work.
Then the third project was done yesterday when I got the camera module. The camera module is just 3 grams and so tiny and really awesome. I wanted to two things with the camera module and did one of them successfully so far. I wanted to be able to stream the video as a webcam so that I can use it as a home security system if I wanted to. Second purpose I have in mind is to use it as a stop motion video catpure system. I can certainly use raspistill and get this done. May be will post it later on how that went.
BTW, I wanted to check out the GPIO (this is brand new to me and not coming from an Electronics/Electrical engineering background, the whole concept of microcontrollers and how those tiny things can do amazing things with very little overhead and hence power is new to me) but didn’t get the time and motivation to spend on a few connecting wires. But I came to know that the led on the camera has an option to disable via a boot config option but it can also be turned on and off programatically later on. So using RPi.GPIO I managed to make the led blink a few times and that’s a good start for a GPIO programming without any wires, breadboard and other stuff needed with kits. Of course, I do want to check out Arduino as time permits.