LCD and Pandora on raspberry pi

P32

Went to town on the raspberry pi this week while I stayed with my friend John in Eureka.

The picture shows my new Pi in a laser cut case I made at TechShop SF last week. On top is a TextStar tiny LCD showing one of 4 screens, this one the wireless USB adapter's IP address. See the post at jeremyblythe.blogspot.co.uk, "Raspberry Pi with TextStar Serial LCD Display" on how to set this up with python.

I used adafruit's nice Occidentalis v0.2 release for the main software, based on Raspbian Wheezy Debian. This has a lot of good packages already built in, including ssh. I just used my Mac Terminal program to set the Pi up over Ethernet initially.

To get pandora going, I used pianobar. The install is simple:
sudo apt-get install pianobar
Set up the config file for automatic login and you're good to go.

To get streaming radio on the Pi, I installed mpd, the Music Player Daemon. This is an easy install also:
sudo apt-get install mpd mpc
See the article at www.t3node.com/blog/streaming-audio-with-mpd-and-icecast2-on-raspberry-pi for setup.

Getting the Pi to work with the popular mpd iPhone client, MPoD, was a bit of a challenge. MPoD could see the Pi via avahi/bonjour, but not connect to it. John found out you have to have bind_to_address for "local host" commented out for MPoD to be able to connect to it.