Oh – This is great!

See a girl and her little brother use SSH to ‘hack’ into their father’s Mac from her Raspberry Pi and learn a little Secure Shell along the way…

To update, I am currently running a RPi Model 2 with a new 32 GB sd micro card w/Debian Jesse. You can look here and here to see how I got this far. The problem of the moment is getting a good browser to work. I really don’t like Epiphany and would like to upgrade to Mozilla’s Iceweasel, I did a manual install which ran fine, but can’t get it to load as it throws an error saying that it can’t find all the resources it needs to run.

I’ve curated a list of resources and, as I’m learning to reach out to Communities more, I’ve done a search on the Raspberry Pi Forum at Raspberry Pi.Org for a fix. From looking on that I’ve decided to try my luck with Chromium 45 – another browser that seems promising. For those new to RPi, I strongly suggest putting some time aside to learn some terminal commands and to learn to copy and paste into the terminal. Much of the help out there gives the necessary code to get the things you need or make the changes you’d like. I attempt to install this from the forum:

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libg/libgcrypt11/libgcrypt11_1.5.0-5+deb7u3_armhf.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/218525709/chromium-browser_45.0.2454.85-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1097_armhf.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/218525711/chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_45.0.2454.85-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1097_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i libgcrypt11_1.5.0-5+deb7u3_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_45.0.2454.85-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1097_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i chromium-browser_45.0.2454.85-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.1097_armhf.deb

Reboot and it’s there and it’s working! Yay!

I want to show you a screenshot of the desktop but don’t know how – back to the community – there is a command line tool (unfortunately) called ‘Scrot.’ – and I get instructions on how to use it.

Well, I’m embarrassed to say that I ran the wrong code in sudo and totally borked my Pi and have decided to reinstall the OS and start again. Frustrating, but live and learn… At least it’ll give me practice on how to reconfigure the system and luckily I have my own breadcrumbs to follow from this weblog!

Update: I was able to put everything back together again and it really didn’t take too long because I had done it before, and yes, it was good practice. 

A Comcast user has used a Raspberry Pi to create a device that will complain to Comcast when service goes well below the speed he’s promised.

Code Below:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys
import csv
import datetime
import time
import twitter

def test():

#run speedtest-cli
print ‘running test’
a = os.popen(“python /home/pi/speedtest/speedtest-cli –simple”).read()
print ‘ran’
#split the 3 line result (ping,down,up)
lines = a.split(‘\n’)
print a
ts = time.time()
date =datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts).strftime(‘%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S’)
#if speedtest could not connect set the speeds to 0
if “Cannot” in a:
p = 100
d = 0
u = 0
#extract the values for ping down and up values
else:
p = lines[0][6:11]
d = lines[1][10:14]
u = lines[2][8:12]
print date,p, d, u
#save the data to file for local network plotting
out_file = open(‘/var/www/assets/data.csv’, ‘a’)
writer = csv.writer(out_file)
writer.writerow((ts*1000,p,d,u))
out_file.close()

#connect to twitter
TOKEN=””
TOKEN_KEY=””
CON_SEC=””
CON_SEC_KEY=””

my_auth = twitter.OAuth(TOKEN,TOKEN_KEY,CON_SEC,CON_SEC_KEY)
twit = twitter.Twitter(auth=my_auth)

#try to tweet if speedtest couldnt even connet. Probably wont work if the internet is down
if “Cannot” in a:
try:
tweet=”Hey @Comcast @ComcastCares why is my internet down? I pay for 150down\\10up in Washington DC? #comcastoutage #comcast”
twit.statuses.update(status=tweet)
except:
pass

# tweet if down speed is less than whatever I set
elif eval(d)<50:
print “trying to tweet”
try:
# i know there must be a better way than to do (str(int(eval())))
tweet=”Hey @Comcast why is my internet speed ” + str(int(eval(d))) + “down\\” + str(int(eval(u))) + “up when I pay for 150down\\10up in Washington DC? @ComcastCares @xfinity #comcast #speedtest”
twit.statuses.update(status=tweet)
except Exception,e:
print str(e)
pass
return

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
test()
print ‘completed’

I really wanted to get an email client onto my Pi, but it seemed like Wheezy wasn’t up to the task so I had to break-up with her. It was a clean break and I’m sure she’s ok about it. I quickly found Jessie and am hoping we can be together for a while.

First I had to get a larger sim card as Jessie weighs in at 3.5 Gb. Then I reformatted it using SDFormatter from SD Association.

I downloaded the image onto my Mac and moved it over to the Pi and installed it with Noobs. Jessie really does seem better and worth the switch. Config is easier and it comes with a nice Office set-up. I couldn’t get the default email client, Claws, to work so I downloaded Icedove, a much better client, the open version of Thunderbird. The add/replace software app didn’t work for me, so I had to learn how to download through the terminal. This advice on doing that was so helpful – I’m glad I found it when I needed it.

Now I’m using both Icedove and Iceweasel on the Pi, have an Office suite, have about 20 Gbs of extra space, and learned a good amount along the way.

My Raspberry Pi works!

All for about $60 plus shipping, and because I already had a keyboard/mouse and HDMI monitor, I have a newly functioning computer. The Raspbian OS includes everything I need, web browser, Scratch, text editor, and a few other things I’m looking forward to exploring.

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B w/wireless.

I hadn’t used Linux for a long time – It was very easy to set up the default graphical OS.

Yes! I was pretty happy to see that…

With ethernet, before I set up WiFi.

It’s a good idea to go through the config tool carefully. Be sure to change your keyboard layout from gb to us.

I really didn’t have any problems – a little bit of trouble getting wifi to connect to my wireless router, but it caught another one just fine.

Peter Oakes’s start-up guide was really helpful:

My Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey arrived. Soon I will be putting it all together, but I thought I should find some good instructional videos first. I found Raspberry Pi IV Beginners  and Peter Oakes’s tutorial to get started on the Pi

and the Makey Makey.com quick start guide,  Design Squad’s description and, Dakota Cooper’s tutorial.