In the spirit of my previous blog post dealing with I-Pac mod It’s time the Banana Pi gets a face-lift with a new case mod. The reason why I’m doing this comes down to a lot of things that all boil down to the fact that my needs from this unit changed a lot over the years. This blog is just a minor update of what we have been doing in between jobs.
There was so many different companies trying to mimic the success of the Raspberry Pi when it made its Kickstarter goals and people were waiting (impatiently sometimes) to acquire one. This will be a short little blog post about walking away from Raspberry Pi and supporting the Banana Pi. Read on if you like.
Transmission is a torrent P2P file sharing software which is open source and can be run on practically every type of platform environment on the face of the earth. Since torrents can take a long time to download depending on how many seeders there are (people with complete copies of said file) versus peers or leechers (people who are attempting to receive files) it makes sense to keep a device on that only takes a few watts of power versus a giant PC which just eats power throughout the night.
Raspberry / Banana Pi with xboxdrvI got you covered on this as well with the help of xboxdrv! Although a little late to the party the Rasbian image initially did not have the xboxdrv library like Ubuntu users were so used to. As a result, Raspberry Pi users had to go through the headaches of compiling it themselves or simply find an alternative such as a genetic joystick or Bluetooth based joystick control provided they have a Bluetooth style receiver.
Note: This blog entry is a child blog off of the chinese xbox 360 receiver entry. If you stumbled upon this page first and have no idea what the hardware is be sure and check out that blog by clicking here.
There is no drag and drop style method for any version of Linux, you’ll have to be typing some commands to get it working.
MiniDLNA is another one of those articles where I had to go bouncing around between various sites to truly get all of the details about how to setup and maintain MiniDLNA properly. For those who do not know what it is. DLNA stands for “Digital Network Living Alliance” and it’s a protocol used in many consoles, smartTV’s even phones as a standardized protocol that they can all communicate on (depending on video and encoder). The Raspberry Pi is perfect for such a project as it’s low power and can put out an ‘okay’ level of bandwidth can can handle most 720p videos and even some 1080p videos that are encoded well. This is also great if you want to have a constant library of music and pictures that you would like to share with your entire LAN for anyone in your house to view or play.