Back in 2015 I was in United States on vacations an decided to bought a Raspberry Pi Canakit. The latest model at that moment was 2 B and the possibilities were infite: learn bash, play movies in a non-smart TV, remote play music, task automation

The reality was a little different. It ended mostly resting in a drawer of my desk until I decided to sell it in 2017.. Maybe lots of you share a similar story

But it was not completely unused. I have implemented a .NET mono POC to remotely play music using SignalR to make it realtime https://github.com/mamcer/usignalr-raspberry and some other quick little POCs

Two days ago I found some txt files with notes in an old private git repository and decided to share them as Gists and then in this blog post

Keep Program running after a ssh session is closed

Install screen

sudo apt-get install screen

Run it:

screen

Commands:

  • Ctrl + A + C: Create a new SCREEN session
  • Ctrl + A + N: Switch to the Next screen session
  • Ctrl + A + P: Switch to the Previous screen session
  • Ctrl + A + D: Detaches a screen session (without killing the * processes in it - they continue)

Close a session:

exit

To see open sessions:

screen -ls

To switch to an open session type:

screen -r 2494.pts-0.raspberrypi (where 2494.pts-0.raspberrypi is the session name)

You can run a program in a screen session and it will continue running after you close your ssh session

Mount Windows share

Install dpkg

dpkg -s cifs-utils

if it is not installed:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

Create shared folder home

sudo mkdir -p /media/[mc]/[public]

Add an entry in fstab

sudo nano /etc/fstab

add the following line:

//[192.168.0.148]/[public] /media/[mc]/[public] cifs guest,uid=[1000],gid=[1000],iocharset=utf8 0 0

guest is basically telling the network drive that it’s a public share, and you don’t need a password to access it (not to confuse with username)
uid=1000 makes the Pi user with this id the owner of the mounted share, allowing them to rename files
gid=1000 is the same as uid but for the user’s group
iocharset=utf8 allows access to files with names in non-English languages.

To know your uid and gid for a specific user you can run:

id [username]

Mount

sudo mount -a

With Credentials

if you need credentials you can configure:

//[192.168.0.148]/[public] /media/[mc]/[public] cifs username=[username],password=[password],uid=[1000],gid=[1000],iocharset=utf8 0 0

you can use a credentials file to make it more secure

source: http://geeks.noeit.com/mount-an-smb-network-drive-on-raspberry-pi

Play video from terminal

Using omxplayer

Example:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ omxplayer -r -b -o local -l 00:12:00 /media/[flash-drive]/videos/my_video.mkv

-b : black background
-o : audio output local (3.5 jack)
-l : start from 00 hours 12 min 00 sec

Then you can use:

  • ”+” to increase volume
  • ”-“ to decrease volume
  • ”s” to enable/disable subtitles
  • Left and Up arrow to jump time
  • “q” to quit

Hopefully they are still current and someone find them useful