Embedded newbie

Since there's a lot of talk about corrupted SD cards, I decided it's best if I take a backup of mine every now and then, to ensure I don't lose all my work due to some stupid corruption. There's many different reasons for the corruption problems: faulty memory cards (SD cards have a limited number of read/write cycles, especially the older ones), counterfeit SD cards ( never buy your SD card off eBay! ), bad formatting (never use the windows disk formatter to format SD cards - instead use the SD Formatter by SD card association), removing the power from Raspberry Pi without proper shutdown, bad USB power supplies for the RasPi and RasPi overclocking. For this  instruction to work, you need a Windows PC and a SD card reader. I use the free program Win32 Disk Imager . It works fast and it's free! First, select a folder and a name for the image file you are going to create. Then select your SD card device and press Read. It's that simple. The only do

If you have used hifi's raspbian-ua-netinst, the unattended Raspbian installer , you might run into problems with modules: depmod -a ERROR: could not open directory /lib/modules/3.10-3-rpi: No such file or directory FATAL: could not search modules: No such file or directory I fixed this problem with: apt-get install git-core apt-get install rpi-update rpi-update reboot Note that this will also upgdare your firmware and the linux kernel!

I wanted to try out audio on the Raspberry Pi, using the Raspbian OS. Here's how I got it to work. The installer I used for Raspbian was the minimal network installer by hifi . This will use up only about 150MB of space and will not install a desktop, so you'll save a lot of resources with this approach. After installing Raspbian, this is what I needed to do in order to get sound output. First, login as root (default password = raspbian - change it ASAP!). Update the package list for APT , the package installer tool of Debian: apt-get update Install ALSA . apt-get install alsa-base At this point I discovered that the minimal installer doesn't include the sound card module of the raspi. Alsa's aplay is a  wav file player, and with it I could check which sound devices are available: aplay -L The output: null     Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) ... and when trying to enable the sound card module, I got an error: mo