Raspberry B+ Power Supply calculation - raspberry-pi

I'm new to Raspberry Pi and I don't understand about electricity. I bought a Raspberry B+ today and a 5V 3A power supply, but I'm afraid to connect it because in several places I read about using 5V 2A power supplies. I believe that only higher voltages can damage the Pi but, since I don't know about Amp, I don't know if this is true for 3A too.
My ideia is create a mini-personal server in my home, running Pidora. For data, I have a 1 Tb external USB drive with no external power supply (Seagate model SRD00F1).
My questions are:
can I use the 5V 3A power supply on Raspberry Pi B+ without damage it?
this power supply is compatible with my external USB drive to keep it on safely?
Thank you!

The Raspberry Pi FAQ says that the B+ uses between 0.7 and 1.0 amps, and suggest a 1.2 amp power supply as a minimum.
Using a power supply with a higher amperage rating will not harm your Raspberry Pi. Devices only draw as much current (amperage) as they need. Any additional capacity is unused.
This is where your question about the external hard drive comes in. If you see in the FAQ, they suggest that you might want a larger power supply if you use all of the USB ports. Every USB device you plug in is going to draw more current. To figure out how much you need, you just add up the requirements of all of the devices like so:
Raspberry Pi = 0.7-1.0A
Mouse/Keyboard = 0.5A
Hard Drive = 1.0A
========================
TOTAL = 2.5A
(These numbers are all fake... be sure to check the requirements for your actual devices.)
So if your devices total 2.5A then a 3A supply will handle all of these plus some room for expansion. If all of your devices total 3.5A, maybe you need to consider a bigger one.

Related

raspberry pi gpio or rs232 relay board for simultaneous output bit-map?

I really wanted at first an rs232 8-channel relay board that I could command devices to turn on/off with a command string.
All of the ones I found online have the same deficiency in functionality for me: you can't set a subset of relays at the exact time. I can set relay 1 on, and then relay 7 on afterwards, I can set all 8 relays at once, but there is no command structure to pick out the exact leds I would like to turn on/off.
In the past I have dealt with hardware that had a bit-map of the IO pins, and a bit-map of the states and would apply all 8 settings at once. here are some examples:
to set pins 1 and 7 to on and the other pins off (8-bit binary bit-mapping,) send the following byte: in binary: 0100 0001b
to set pins 1,2,3,6 to on and the other pins off (8-bit binary bit-mapping,) send the following byte: in binary: 0010 0111b
I couldn't find any such device to do this so I thought I could make one with a raspberry pi using a simple 8-channel relay board, something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-101-70-102-8-Channel-Relay-Module/dp/B0057OC5WK
but on a Raspberry Pi, I'm running into the same issue: I don't see a way to set the gpio pins as a block command, only individually setting them in a for loop. I looked all morning and can see things like gpioctl, and mmio, but I can't put it all together to a simple proof of concept program on a testboard, any help would be appreciated.
I would really like a solution in C or scripting,
Thanks,
jleslie

Ethernet cable to DB15 connector

Morning Overflowers,
For a specific in-house application for my company, I need to be able to make a Gigabit ethernet connection go through DB15 connectors, as seen bellow.
Here is what I'm trying to achieve:
For the first version, I just cut in half a cat 5e ethernet cable. I did not care too much about the pin-out from the cable to the DB15 connector and in the end I ended up having a 10MBit/s data rate, which is super low. Also my cable was super short, 2m in total.
For the second version I used a 5m cat 6 cable for one side, and the remain of the other cat 5e cable (resoldered) for the other side. I was more careful about the pinout and used the 4 left most pins to place the ethernet pairs as seen here:
The data rate is this time 100 MBits/s, but still not 1 GBits/s.
Before going through a 3rd version I thought I'd use my brain a little. I noticed while soldering that although inside a cat 5e/cat 6 cable there are 4 pairs, not all of them are side by side on the RJ45 socket as seen on figure bellow where blue and green wires are a bit mixed.
There is probably a reason for that arrangement and putting pairs together other that inside the cable itself is not probably a good idea, which leads to my question.
For version 3, should I just keep pin 1 to 8 in that order and solder them to the DB15 connector on adjacent pins?
More generally I am aware that unless the DB15 section is super short I won't be able to maintain Gibabit ethernet due to noise and other problems caused by unmatched pairs on that section.
I am open to any suggestion or tips or anything :)
Thanks in advance
After trial and errors, it turned out that it works fine if you arrange pairs to match a RJ45 connector (like on the figure "ethernet plug wiring"). The quality of the cable is probably not the one of a perfect 5e/6 cable but my computer can negociate a Gbits connection and transfer files over the network at speeds way above 10 MB/s reaching 50 MB/s. I always soldered more section with various connectors and it worked fine too.

How to decrease wifi link quality and/or wifi signal level?

I have been following a tutorial that enables you to play around with the TXPOWER parameter of your wifi card / wifi adapter:
http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/set-your-wi-fi-cards-tx-power-higher-than-30-dbm-0149606/
You can easily boost up your wifi range when increasing the TXPOWER.
Now, most people want to improve their wifi signal strength of their home router, right. But in my case, I would like my home router (which runs on a raspberry pi) to have a relative small wifi signal radius (say, a radius of 2 meters), so that you actually need to physically look for the pi home router when trying to connect to it.
I have learned that this tutorial does not do a thing with the wifi link quality and/or the wifi signal level and thus does not influence the wifi radius of my pi home router.
link quality & signal level
Do you guys have any ideas/thoughts about how to decrease link quality and/or wifi signal level (e.g Link Quality = 12/70 and Signal level =-10dBm) ? Is this even possible ?
I am using a Tp-Link TL-WN722N IEEE 802.11n USB - Wi-Fi Adapter.
WIRELESS LITE N ADAPTER 150M USB HIGH GAIN 1DETACHABLE ANTENNA WL-AP.
150 Mbps - External
First, I recommend reviewing this section from your link:
QUICK DECIBEL UNDERSTANDING:
Every 10 decibels is a 10X increase in power starting from 1 dBm equal
to 1mW... 10 dBm equals 10 mW, 20 dBm equals 100 mW, 30 dBm equals
1000 mW, and so on. Every 3 decibels is approximately double that of
the prior power, so 30 dBm is 1000 mW, if we add 3 dBm, then we can
double the power such that 33 dBm is about equal to 2000 mW.
It appears to me that you are able to modify the transmit power of your adapter as the tutorial states. Are you saying this is not working? If you set your transmit power to something extremely low (-30dBm, for example) you would effectively be turning off the transmitter. Keep increasing that value until you get your desired coverage radius.
If the transmit power parameter is not functioning as per the tutorial, then there are other means to achieve reduced coverage. The model you specified has a detachable antenna....so detach it. This would definitely reduce your coverage. However, if it reduces coverage too much, you could simply add an inline attenuator. Fortunately, your antenna uses an SMA connector which is very common. You can find many SMA attenuators on ebay with different attenuation values. Experiment with different values until you get the desired coverage.
And if that doesn't work, just wrap a bunch of aluminum foil around the thing lol.

Anker Astro E4 to power Raspberry Pi

Looking for some help to be honest, This is not my area of knoladge atall.
Ive read around the question of powering my Pi with a battery, now I nabbed one of these guys for my phone
http://www.amazon.co.uk/13000mAh-Portable-External-Technology-Motorola-Black/dp/B00BQ5KHJW/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1420826597&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=anker+astro+e4
Incase the link dies in the future;
Item model number: AK-79AN13K2-BA
AnkerĀ® 2nd Gen Astro E4 13000mAh 2-Port (3A Output) Fast
Max 3A Out
5V Out
Now, from what i've read there have been mixed notes of, don't use batterys, only use this battery, don't do this, don't exeed this magical number ( which was differant each time ). so any help would be grately needed. If i was to power my pi via this thing. im I going to get a poof of smoke and need to replace the poor pi :(
A raspberry Pi is powered via USB, which means that it simply takes the 5V supplied via USB to run. As long as your current source is stable (ie. it doesn't change when you draw current from it), no device will care whether it is a battery or a switching power supply. Now, a bare raspberry Pi B uses less than 2W of power, 2W/5V = 0.4A = 400mA, so if that battery pack lives up to its specification, you are going to be fine. The device is spec'ed to provide 13000mAh, so at a constant current of 400mA, this would last you more than 32 hours.
Now, most people attach something to the raspberry, and that something will also draw power, but just add that power to the calculations above, to see if it's going to work out.

What does PI in OSIsoft's 'PI System' stand for?

What does PI in OSIsoft's 'PI System' stand for?
I can't tell if it stands for the symbol/number Pi, or if it stands for a previous name for the technology, like 'Process Intelligence'. PI is too close to the more common BI to be just a coincidence.
Note - There are Channel9 videos that demonstrate how MS uses OSIsoft to monitor some operations. Links to the C9 videos are from the 'SQL 2008 R2' CEP pages. The SQL CEP features are called StreamInsight.
PI used to stand for "Plant Information". Now that the PI System suite of products does much more and is used in many different environments, PI is just "PI".
PI stands for Plant Information or Process Information, depending on who you ask.
A little bit of history for you; before PI was used in various industries, it was mainly geared to oil/gas. OSI used to stand for Oil Systems Incorporated.
Mainly to store a large amount of historical data for industrial purposes.
A good example is when you need to develop an enhancement in your process to reduce the energy consuption then you can use the informations of each equipment and make plans to reduce it's energy consuption.
Other example is when you need to make industrial informations available for the entire corporation, as the state of a equipment (stopped or running). The PI System has it's own interfaces to make it possible.
PI stands for process intelligence!whereby in its storage of information like intersection of matrices where there is small set of universe which represent the system,that intersection has never been zero,like for pi it has information as long as it is in connection with the plant.