[sclug] Pi has arrived!

[Simon Reap]

On 18/11/12 14:06, Neil Haughton wrote:
> Much excitement here - my Pi has finally arrived, after a delivery period
> that would have made even Clive Sinclair blush.

It does all seem a bit random.  I had my first (delivered by RS) and my 
second (ordered from Farnell) long before a colleague had his first from 
RS.  All three are Chinese 256MB ones, even though 2 arrived long after 
Swansea took over, and fairly soon after the 512MB was announced.  Maybe 
I'll have to order another one!
> My burning question is: has anyone of you actually used on of these in a
> real project, and if so, for what?

We had a very dodgy VPN at work (underpowered server, it turned out), so 
I set up a Pi to monitor the link, and light up some LEDs if it was up.  
That way we could easily see the link state, even from across the 
office.  It was only really doable because of GPIO - something that none 
of the normal PCs in the office could do.  Once the VPN alert lights 
were set up, I added a webcam to the Pi (just a cheap-n-cheerful one - 
worked immediately).  I pointed the camera at the LEDs, and ran the 
"motion" program to take a picture every few seconds, and configured it 
to call a script to scp the new picture to our web server.  That way, I 
could log in from home to check the VPN status!

The VPN has now been fixed, so I have brought the Pi home.  It's now set 
up with a slightly different "motion" config, to monitor our dog while 
we are out - it takes pictures and .swf videos whenever the dog moves 
(which it turns out isn't very often when there's no-one home for a 
couple of hours!).