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Raspberry Pi

Affordable Bluetooth 4.0 USB Dongle For Raspberry Pi

While Raspberry Pi certainly is a cheap mini-computer, adding accessories to it blows up ownership costs a lot. While adding WiFi is relatively cheap, finding a compatible Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 (BLE) for a bargain is hard. Luckily, I found the Orico BTA-403 Mini Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter Dongle which comes with CSR8510 Low Energy Chip and is compatible with Linux and Raspberry Pi despite being not listed as such in the description, this is certainly a must-have deal for $8 including worldwide shipping. Instructions for setup are as shared below.

ORICO BTA-4 BLE USB

Raspberry Pi Gets A New Modern Web-browser

Raspberry Pi team has been working with Collabora to offer a better web-browsing experience on the mini-computer, their efforts have now getting results in form of Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). The up-to-date, HTML5-capable web browser for the Pi aims to support a reasonably good multi-tab web-surfing experience with ARMv6-optimized 2d rendering and accelerated image and HTML5 video decoding. The new web-browser for Raspberry Pi is offers better interactivity during page loading and faster scrolling.

HTML5 Capable Web-browser For Raspberry Pi

[Infographic] Everything About Raspberry Pi

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MicroXwin Runs Debian & Android Together, Works Faster On Raspberry Pi

X- Window System is the core graphic-framework for Unix/Linux desktops. Sadly, it does not works very well with low-power mini-pc's like Raspberry Pi and therefore alternatives like Wayland are being developed. MicroXwin is a kernel-based X Windows implementation, which claims to be the smallest and fastest X implementation promising a faster, stable and has low-latency GUI on mini-pc's with the added advantage of being a unified Linux distribution that can run Android and Debian/Ubuntu applications simultaneously. Both Android and Debian apps run at native speeds and unlike other hacks Debian apps don't depend on Android and has full compatibility with all Android applications.

This is looking to be a great solution to the lack of proper graphic-driver problem on Debian ARM, which prevents proper YouTube and HD video playback on these devices where Android will act as the solution under the unified distribution. VolksPC, the company behind MicroXwin have also shared two videos - one showing Debian-Android duality, and the other showing upto 66% faster desktop performance on Raspberry Pi.

[Video] Modern And Fluid Maynard Desktop For Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is not designed to run heavy KDE or Gnome based Dekstop interfaces and users are looking forward to a more responsive and modern desktop then current default LXDE shell. Wayland Weston is the answer with it's minimal and fast compositor which is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases like RPi.

Maynard a new desktop environment designed for the Raspberry Pi utilizes Wayland and the power of Hardware Video Scaler (HVS) inside the BCM2835 chip of Raspberry Pi's hardware to offer a much smoother, yet modern looking working environment on limited system resources. The future default Desktop environment for Raspberry Pi is far for complete, but has started to take a nice shape destined to be a fully-functional, light and pretty shell. Do watch the video demonstration shared below and follow the simple installation instructions to try it yourself.

Maynard Desktop For Raspberry Pi

Remote Pi - Use Mobile Devices As Wireless KB/Trackpad For Raspberry Pi

Remote Pi is an application for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Google Android which allows users to utilize their mobile-devices as an wireless keyboard and trackpad for Raspberry Pi. Once installed user can send keystrokes and mouse events to you Raspberry Pi computers over TCP/IP via a wired or wireless network, the utility not only saves money for an additional keyboard-mouse but also keeps a USB port free on the Rapsberry Pi.

Remote Pi

Radxa Rock - The $99 Quad Core, 2 GB RAM Mini Computer With Android And Linux Support

Raspberry Pi - the hacker friendly, cheap mini-computer started a whole new niche of users tinkering with these easily accessible hardware and open-source software to create awesome projects. There are now a plethora of such ARM development boards from single-core, dual-core to quad-code varieties having all sorts of ARM CPU options like Rockchip, i.MX Freescale, Samsung Exynos etc. with various RAM, connectivity and falsh storage options.

Radxa Rock is the newest entry into this arena and seems to pack a solid punch of hardware and software power, powered by Quad core ARM Cortex-A9 processor the board manages to clock as high as 1.6Ghz and as low as 324Mhz, balancing between performance and power saving. The single-board computer uses RK3188 as the quad-core CPU and comes with 2GB DDR3 @ 800Mhz, 8GB Nand Flash, Micro-SD SDXC up to 128GB, Mali400-mp4@533Mhz GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, video output via HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p@60hz, integrated Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi with external antenna, LAN, RTC, IR, USB OTG, S/PDIF, headphone jack, built-in microphone and 80 pins including GPIO, I2C, SPI, Line in, USB 2.0, PWM, ADC, LCD, etc. allowing users to easily connect rock with breadboard or other sensor boards.

Radxa Rock

How To Mount DD Disk Images With Read/Write Support On Windows

When it comes to perfect backup's, RAW disk-images are the choice for safest form of backup and restoration of fully functional operating-system installations. We have shared two methods of using the same to backup Raspberry Pi SD Card from Windows as well as Hot Backup's from RPi itself using Linux DD disk imaging utility. Once created we can also Mount these backup images with full read-write access for various tasks like Data recovery (For example imaging an corrupted disk and accessing the disk-image from another working computer to recover data).

OSFMount is a free Windows utility which allows you to do that, the software enables users to mount local disk image files in Windows with a drive letter which can be accessed like any other partition. The images can be mounted in read-only mode as well as write-enabled mode, OSFMount also supports creation of RAM disks (See What are RAM Disks and How they can be used to make use of non-addressable wasted RAM on Windows) which offers a huge speed boost over using disk-based images.

OSFMount

Installing and configuring Siriproxy on Raspberry Pi

Combine the awesomeness of Apple's Siri voice recognition capability with ability to tap into it using SiriProxy, and our favorite hacker friendly mini Linux computer Raspberry Pi and we have an excellent voice controlled home automation system which runs 24/7 waiting for voice commands to do assigned tasks. To get this super-geeky project working we need to install and configure SiriProxy on our Raspberry Pi setup, follow the instructions shared below to install SiriProxy on the official Raspbian “wheezy” distribution.

SiriProxy Demonstration

Easiest Method To Install Webserver On Raspberry Pi With PHP Support

The wonderful, multi-utility, mini-computer Raspberry Pi can also be used as an web-server. While you can't expect it to handle massive traffic, it can easily handle decent amount of static web-page traffic and can also be used as an web or mobile front-end for controlling RPi connected devices, services and GPIO for home automation. We have quite a few choices of web-servers to install on Debian, amongst the contenders we have apache, nginx, lighthttpd, Monkey web-server and quite a few others suitable on limited resources of Raspberry Pi. We will be installing the light, fast and well-supported nginx webserver with PHP support on Raspberry Pi as it behaves well with the mini-computer and takes only 5 minutes to get installed and working using the tutorial shared below.

nginx server on Raspberry Pi
This is just one of the many helpful tips we have posted, You can find more stories here,
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