Writing.Com General Discussion

I've been busy building things with Raspberry Pi's, some for fun and some to complement my writing. If you don't know, a Raspberry Pi is a computer the size of a credit card, and costs about £34.

I started with a clock that tells the time anywhere on Mars, that is skinnable and can display information on past missions that made it to the surface. It is self-correcting, monitors leap second adjustments and automatically updates when a new mission lands. You can see screen shots and a detailed explanation here: https://philip-p-ide.uk/doku.php/blog/articles/raspberry/phys_marsclock/pi_marsv...

Next I made a Pi-Hole (ad-blocking device), followed by a NAS so I could put some disks on the network. I put all my music on one of them, and built a music centre that can pipe the music to my surround-sound system via fibre-optic cable.

Next I made a cron server, which logs onto various NASA servers at intervals and fetches down data, then processes the data before uploading it to my website.

While all this was going on, I began building a laptop computer, out of a Raspberry Pi and a pizza box (I got an unused one from the local pizzeria). Every component costs less than £35 (Pi and power management module were exceptions to this rule - the Pi costs £84 and the PMM costs £54), and it was built to run for 30 hours straight on batteries.

I use SyncThing to emulate DropBox/OneDrive, synchronising both my desktop and laptop to the NAS. After adding a VPN so I can access my home network from anywhere with an internet connection, I then set about finding good writing software that worked seamlessly on both Windows (my desktop) and Linux (the laptop).

I settled on creating a DokuWiki wiki-farm, whereby I can create as many wiki's as I like, with each wiki being a new writing project. DokuWiki stores the wiki page data in regular text files, so it is very easy to backup and restore. As a wiki, it also gives me the ability to roll-back to any previous version of a document. After adding a tree-view plugin, I can create (and visually see) a novel broken down into chapters and scenes, research and notes.

On the laptop, I have also created an offline version of the wiki (using SyncThing) that allows me to work outside the home when access to an internet connection isn't available.

Finally, I added a DLNA server to my music system, so I can stream my music (all 33,000 tunes) to any suitable device anywhere in the world - as long as I can make that all important VPN connection.

I've just come into a little money so I'm currently upgrading the pizza box to an aluminium briefcase (like a camera case but slimmer), and upgrading the 10" screen to a 15". More pixels means more power, so the batteries won't last as long, but with 30hrs of runtime I think I've got a bit of slack.