A while back I made an official 0.5.0 release for PiBox [1] which I announced on the Raspberry Pi Forums [2]. Since then I've made significant advances in preparing pibox [3] for use as a media server [4] in my travel trailer. Some of the features I've recently implemented include:
- Support for running as a wireless access point
- Support for full network configuration through a custom UI
- Support for running dhcp server
- Support for USB-attached displaylink [5] Monitor
- Enabled nfs [6] support
- Enabled webcam support
Other features which are currently in development [7] include
- Web streaming of webcam
- I2C monitor of sensors (temperature at a minimum)
- Alsa sound support
- Integration of XBMCBox package to play NFS mounted videos
At the moment PiBox will depend on a 10 port USB powered hub with a 2.5A or higher rating. The DisplayLink monitor will be used for system monitoring displays. A miniature wireless keyboard/mouse device will initially be used for input but I'd like to switch that to either a touch screen DisplayLink monitor (preferred) or a handheld remote of some kind.
When I'm done I expect to be able to:
- Stream webcam monitoring out the back window to a tablet's browser (so I can see behind the trailer from the tow vehicle using existing capabilities of tablets and phones)
- Serve media files mounted on USB attached SD cards over NFS
- Play videos wirelessly over NFS through xbmc [8] using an hdmi [9] attached micorDLP projector [10] (that displays on the outside wall of the trailer but inside our R-Dome).
Things are moving along pretty good now. I still have some cleanup to do of the DisplayLink UI and will have to write special applications for monitoring and displaying output from sensors. But I'm getting close to being able to stream the webcam and using XBMC on a second PiBox. With luck I should have most of this working before Halloween.
