So just a quick one today, found an awesome command utility to be able to cast content to a chromecast! It does local content, content from the interwebs and can even stream torrents :O https://github.com/xat/castnow Kudos to old mate xat for this one Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it working from my raspberry pi yet :( Keep getting build errors when trying to install it via npm… I will update once I finally figure it out Read more

This one’s a bit off topic.. But from my last post, about LimitlessLED’s. The android app that they tell you to use from the play store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lierda.wificontroller&hl=en) is functional, but terribly slow at starting up, and giving you access to your light. More often then not, my wife an I would find ourselves just using the physical light switch instead. So Finally I found a pretty awesome app for controlling LED lights, (https://play. Read more

My next major purchase was a Ninja Block for the Raspberry pi. I bought this ages ago, but never got around to writing about it! http://shop.ninjablocks.com/pages/picrust I thought this was cool as it was a low cost way to start my home automation projects, and it is definitely marketed at the hobbiest, and I would not recommend this one for commercial use. Check out there NinjaSphere, which is aimed at plug n play users. Read more

I ordered a couple of gadget for my pi a while ago, and they finally came in the mail ( only had to wait 2 months!) Anyways, I ordered a water-proof digital temperature sensor (DS18B20) and a ultrasonic range finder (HC-SR04) to play around with. So firstly I wanted to get the temperature sensor going. I followed the adafruit tutorial, just to hook the temp sensor to the pi (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-11-ds18b20-temperature-sensing/hardware) Once it was physically connected, lets check if it works Read more

A month or so ago, I was trying to figure out how to use eztv’s rss feed to automatically download new torrents to my pi. That’s when I ran across the awesome python program called flexget. (link here)With this you can specify the shows you like, and it will check for new episodes and add them to your torrent client for download. It does a lot more then this,but this is the main way I use it at the moment. Read more

Now we have a webserver, torrent server (which is downloading all your torrents to an attached hard drive), I have set up a file server to serve the torrent folder to my windows computers in the house. This means I can plug my laptop in the TV, browse to the rpi, and play a show :). Here’s how I did so. First you need to make sure you have samba installed Read more

So now all that your web server is up and running, and you have a Dynamic DNS name (if you chose to do that), here’s how I set up the torrent server on the pi (using transmission) credit goes to this website for helpful instructions. I also had a spare 500gb external harddrive (externally powered too) that I am using as storage for the downloads (I only have a 4gb SD for the pi) so instructions for setting this up, credit goes to this webiste Read more

So the first thing I did was use this very helpful guide to help setup my pi as a LAMP server. I didn’t follow the whole thing, just the bits I needed.So following is the basics..firstly install apache sudo apt-get install apache2 and then mysql sudo apt-get install mysql-server And finally PHP sudo apt-get install php5 sudo apt-get install php5-mysql Once this is done go to your pi’s IP address to make sure apache works Read more