Book Image

Raspberry Pi 2 Server Essentials

By : Piotr J Kula
Book Image

Raspberry Pi 2 Server Essentials

By: Piotr J Kula

Overview of this book

There’s no end to what you can do with a Raspberry Pi – it makes a huge range of tech projects possible. This book shows you how to transform it into a multipurpose web server, able to store and manage resources that lets you build some truly innovative and impressive computing creations. You’ll learn how to use your Raspberry Pi 2 to host a website using a range of different languages, host a game server, store files, and run everything from a media center to a cloud network. If you want to take control of your technological world, start building your own server and find out what’s possible with the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Begin by getting your Pi set up – follow each step as the book shows you how to prepare a network and configure the additional features that you’ll need to build your projects. Once you’ve done this you’ll dig a little deeper and set up your pi as a file server, making sure it’s built for speed using a range of different tools, including Python, Node.js and ASP.NET. Following this the book shows you how to extend your server to allow you to host games, and stream live HD video before customizing it even further to create a fully-fledged media center. It doesn’t stop there however – the book then dives into the exciting world of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll learn how to install Windows IoT onto your Raspberry Pi, the operating system that’s driving embedded software projects all around the world. Once you’ve done this you’ll be ready to explore IoT further, as the book shows you how to use your device to host a cloud network that can form the basis of a wider IoT project.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Raspberry Pi 2 Server Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Playing audio


The latest Raspbian image comes with all the sound drivers and utilities installed. The packages that are used belong to ALSA. The Raspberry Pi has no way to record audio as it has no microphone jack, and the GPIO pins are all digital. To record audio using GPIO, we need to use an A/D (analog-to-digital) device or a USB sound device that has a microphone input.

Aplay for audio playback

The following is a pre-installed package that plays WAV files:

cd /tmp 
wget http://goo.gl/Ps3paV 
mv Ps3paV siren.wav 
aplay siren.wav 

OMXPlayer for audio playback

OMXPlayer is not just used to play videos. It also supports the playback of audio files, such as MP3 files, and it will try to use hardware decoding if possible:

 omxplayer audio-test.mp3 

Using AirPlayer

There is a project called shairport that works really well on the Raspberry Pi. It does not support videos or photos, but streaming music in it is very stable. We will need to get the project and compile it. This will only take a few...