Raspbian

[Void Main]

I picked up a few Raspberry Pi devices a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with them. These things are friggin' awesome! I ordered all kinds of gadgets to hook up to them and play around. I have 2 of the Zero Ws and 1 3 B+. I modified a power strip with a relay and a Pi Zero and can control my light via web server over wireless to the power strip. I have servos, cameras (IR and NoIR), breadboards, power supply, all kinds of sensors (temperature, light, motion, etc). I want to come up with some sort of project, maybe using stepper motors, servos and sensors, but I am not very creative and can't come up with anything. Any ideas?

I find the 3 B+ particularly cool. It's a quad core ARM processor running Rasbian (basically Debian). I have a 32G micro SD card for the file system. Has built in wireless N, 4 USB ports, HDMI, etc. You can plug in a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle and hook up a monitor via HDMI and it's basically a full on computer with full graphical interface. It's a mini Linux box with a good set of GPIO pins to control devices with. There are a million things out there on Youtube about it. The 3 B+ was only 35 bucks, The Zeros I believe were only like 15 or 20 bucks.

[Basher52]

C00l, just got myself a 3B+ a couple of weeks ago to play with. It's from a friend so it loaded with all sorts of retro games in the 8G SD.
I haven't found a cable for it yet, it's somewhere in my cases so I haven't tried it yet.<
Also got 2 Arduino's to play with but those has no OSes so.

I'm gonna build a plotter with stepper motors and the Arduino so why don't you try that with the Pi?

[Void Main]

I was thinking about some sort of CNC device (like a plotter). I also have an Arduino that I picked up several years ago. It has "some" advantages over a Pi (analog GPIO pins) but overall a Pi is way more powerful.

[Basher52]

In some ways yes, but the startup time and also in power consumption, think not

[Void Main]

On the power strip that I added the Pi Zero to I just ssh in and set up a cron job to turn the lights on and off every day at the times I want. On an Arduino I would have to write a program and hook a cable up to it and upload the program. I can also control it from a web page, or a phone app. It's just about unlimited what you can do.

[Void Main]

Here's a couple of hours of fiddling right after I got it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB2DklWk9Dg

[Basher52]

Cool
What kind of program language is that done in or is it just some logic library that you can use fro things like this?

[Void Main]

Oh, that was just a simple few lines in a shell script using the gpio command. e.g:

Turn a pin on send a 1, turn it off send a 0:

/usr/bin/gpio mode 7 output
/usr/bin/gpio write 7 1

[Basher52]

OK, so no language and not logic, just simple
I gotta find my HDMI cable so I can test this sucker

Oh btw, you got a link to a "simple" manual to this?
I got nothing for PI's but plenty for Arduino

[Void Main]

There are a million videos on YouTube about it. I actually only hooked a monitor up to it just to see what it looked like but I just use ssh.

[Basher52]

OK, then I'll UT it
If you have something cool to show then lemme know