Raspberry Pi advice

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Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Tue Oct 04, 2016 3:25 am

I'm hoping some technical folk here have some advice about a non PIC related topic :).

I do all the technical support at our car club's hillclimb circuit, particularly in relation to the timing.
We have some large-screen TVs driven from an HDMI signal to display run times as they occur.
Right now they are driven from a netbook running a Visual Basic program under Windows XP.
(I've done both VB6 and VB.net versions of this program.)
It receives very simple packets of text over ethernet using UDP and a very simple packet scheme I designed.

(This is coming from another netbook in the timing hut, connected to a PIC based timer that I built.)

I would love to replace the netbook driving the screens with a Raspberry Pi, setup so it started running the software as soon as it had power.
I've read that it's possible to install a version of Windows 10 on the RBP, and run dot net applications on it, but that seems pretty inefficient to me.
Has anyone done it?

Otherwise, is there a simple graphical C environment that can run on the RBP using the standard Pi Linux OS, which doesn't require much programming to do UDP communications, and show a few list boxes on the screen?

Here's what the current screen looks like (it's 1024x768 pixels now, but the Pi and screens can all ramp up to 1920x1080)
The two big grey rectangles are standard Microsoft List boxes that get filled in line by line with driver run times.

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You can see there's plenty of room to mount a RBP next to the screen. :)
(That's a 42" HDTV. The cabinet is oversize because there is a 55" one on the other side.)
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Wed Oct 05, 2016 3:22 am

The Windows 10 option appears to have a fair bit of support from Microsoft.
See: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot

However, step one is to install Windows 10 onto your Windows PC, and I've been avoiding that like the plague...
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby AussieSusan » Wed Oct 05, 2016 4:23 am

The RPi can use a standard form of Linux (your choice - many are Debian based and derived from Ubuntu such as Rasbian).
Therefore you can use all of the standard Linux 'tricks' to write your on code (in whatever language you want) and have it automatically start by adding in the command to the appropriate script or have it set up as a daemon.
Have a look at the 'PiBakery' tool which provides you with a block-based way to do this.
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Wed Oct 05, 2016 4:39 am

I have an RPi2+ I bought about a year ago, and I think it's Rasbian on the SD card, but I've not done much more than turn it all on and make sure it worked.
What I'm really looking for is the easiest way to construct a GUI app that can do UDP comms and display the info received.
I've had years of experience with VB6, and can muddle through with VB.net and C#.
I'm just not sure what would be the best tool to use under Linux. I see Python mentioned a fair bit, but don't really feel like learning Yet Another Language, even if it is similar to C. :)
As you can probably guess, I'm a Linux newbie ;)
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby AussieSusan » Thu Oct 06, 2016 2:29 am

You could install Mono and that will run the c# code.
If the version if Rasbian is that old and you have nothing else on that RPi, then it might be an idea to download the latest version from the Raspberry Pi web site.
The alternative is to run the 'sudo apt-get update' and 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' sequence but be prepared to wait along time for the last command to complete - even if the version of Rasbian is only a few months old there can be enough revision of the various products to take longer than downloading the latest version and coping that to the SD card.
(I'm a relative Linux newbie as well but it is starting to make a bit of sense!)
I see Python mentioned a lot - and some of tbe people use it quite a bit here at work - but as far as I am concerned it simply falls in line with other languages such as FORTRAN, C/C++/C#/VB, Java and all the rest - they each have they pluses and minuses so you sleect teh best one for the task at hand.
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Thu Oct 06, 2016 3:02 am

Yeah, Mono looks like it may be the solution.
I've only been tinkering with the Pi, so I have no qualms about reformatting the SD card and starting again.
( I do have a "fibre to the home" NBN connection at home, but it's probably cleaner to just download the latest full package.)

The aim here is to simplify the whole system, so you can just turn it on, and it goes.
Right now I have to connect up the netbook before every event, make sure the screen saver is disabled, and run an application once Windows has finished booting, and switch it to projector mode to drive the HDMI output.
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby AussieSusan » Fri Oct 07, 2016 2:33 am

Actually the time required for the updates is more determined by the speed of the SD card you are using.
It might not help you much for this project, but there are some (well advanced) experiments going on to allow you to boot via a USB connection or Ethernet. Tis can get around the SD card bottle neck.
On the other hand a Class 10 SD Card performs pretty well.
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Fri Oct 07, 2016 3:07 am

I'll give it a go on the weekend.
We only have one event left this year, a huge "Historic and Classic" hillclimb on Nov-20.
You can get an idea what sort of cars run at http://gallery.mgcc.info/2015-24th-Hist ... Hillclimb/
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUGV4C28sjU

I have a number of other jobs on my plate, so this probably won't be up and running until our first event next year.

Have you actually played with an RPi Susan, or is this all just from your research? :)
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby AussieSusan » Mon Oct 10, 2016 2:56 am

I have several RPi2's and and 2 RPI3's.
One of the RPI3's is currently being set up to monitor the NOAA satellites as they pass overhead and save the maps for display via a web site on my home network.
I'm also planing on getting one of the RPi2's to monitor my home weather station and send the data not just to Weather Underground (as it does now) but also to WOW and other home weather sites.
I've hooked up an RPi2 to a touch screen but I'm having some issues with that as the virtual keyboard is not that great - it pops up in the same place on the screen and can obscure the text box I'm trying to type into. I'm thinking of re-purposing that setup to something that has a non-textual GUI only.
However, I'm still very much on the learning curve and I'm sure there will me many more amateur radio and other hobby related project s coming in the future.
Also played with Arduinos which (to my mind) sit between the full-scale computer environment of an RPi and the bare metal of a microcontroller.
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Re: Raspberry Pi advice

Postby ric » Mon Oct 10, 2016 3:08 am

What language/development environment are you using?
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