My Pi

My Pi is a version 2. I hadn't had the need to closely look at a circuit board in a number of years so I was astounded to see the small size of some of the surface mounted components (resistors, capacitors, diodes, and leds).  In my day of PC board design, the smallest resistors I delt with were 1mm and 2mm long.  Now I see there are resistors as small as .4mm long.  Wow!  I can remove and replace the 2mm resisters and possibly the 1mm ones, but the .4mm resistors - forgetaboutit.  You need a microscope. You'll see in a later post where I added 24 of the 2mm resistors to my Gert board.

For wireless, I have an Edinax EW-7811Un, USB, WiFi adapter. As you can see from the photo above, this 802.11b/g/n adapter is tiny.  It works great.  As far as I know, I have never had a dropout.  The photo in the title above was taken outside of my house (for the even lighting) and a fair distance from my router - and the Pi is up and running. 

I don't have room for a monitor and keyboard fior the Pi so I use TinyVPN for communications between my desktop and the Pi. I'm surprised how well it works. I could not have set this up without my son's help. I use putty/pscp SSH for copying files between the Pi and the desktop. My Linux distribution is Occidentals V.0.2.

I have another SD card with XBMC loaded. I connect to the TV via the HDMI port.  I use xbmcRemote app to control the Pi. I guess I'm not the most patient guy around, because I found the speed of the XBMC file access to be frustratingly slow.  I did see a few old Star Trek programs but haven't used it since.

I'll report on other hardware and software I have for the Pi in future blogs.