I’ve started digging into the Raspberry Pi these past few days. I bought a book on Amazon and found it way too basic, but it works well as a table of contents. That’s good enough for me. There are still plenty of hardware questions I need to ask an old classmate about. I actually wanted to get into the Raspberry Pi last year, but the real trigger for deciding to study it was that the company is taking on some embedded system interaction projects, and the Raspberry Pi is a great cost-saving way to learn, test, and even actually deploy things.
My own expectations for using a Raspberry Pi at home center mainly on an XBMC media center. Right now at home I have an AirPort Extreme gigabit router, a MyBookLive 2T NAS, and an Apple TV jailbroken to run XBMC.
The reason I use the big AE is that 100Mbps routers are too slow — the gigabit AE paired with the MBL network can hit 90MB/s~100MB/s read speeds on a computer, as I mentioned before. It also handles the “Back to My Mac” feature really well.
The XBMC on my jailbroken Apple TV performs great, but it requires me to jailbreak, which means I can’t upgrade the Apple TV to the latest version. So I’ve never been able to use AirPlay Mirroring.
I’m planning to install Raspbmc or Xbian on the Raspberry Pi to replace the Apple TV’s XBMC, and pick up Python along the way to do some smart home development. Then the Apple TV can be upgraded without jailbreaking — the new ATV system supports AirPlay Mirroring and also supports extended display for OS X 10.9, which is pretty tempting. Upgrading also gets me iCloud. My ATV is still on iOS 4 even now — doesn’t even have movie trailers, still has MobileMe, so retro.
The reasons I kept the ATV from upgrading before: 1) my old iPad and old iPhone couldn’t mirror; 2) OS X’s multi-display support wasn’t good enough, and it couldn’t use AirPlay for extended screens; 3) the XBMC at home was indispensable. Now the timing is right — old devices are gradually being replaced with new ones, AirPlay can do extended screens, and XBMC can be replaced by a cheaper Raspberry Pi. All the problems are about to be solved.
Today PD emailed me saying PD7 won’t support Mavericks; to stay compatible, I’d have to upgrade to Parallals Desktop 9. The upgrade costs ¥299, which is pretty pricey for me too, considering the OS upgrade is expected to be only $29.
I picked up a LeapMotion in August and after a brief hands-on, it’s a long way from my original idea of replacing the mouse — because this kind of 3D world-tracking input device simply can’t let users intuitively feel where a plane is. So in everyday use, people can’t input as accurately as with a mouse. And operating with your fingers in mid-air gets tiring. Right now the apps on AirSpace aren’t polished enough either — I bought GameWave and tried playing MineCraft, and found it not practical enough. My assessment is that it’s only suited to interaction design for exhibitions or special occasions. So I still haven’t done any substantial development with it, but the company will find a use for it down the road.