Hi, how many of you have one of these lying around? A raspberry pie bit an original raspberry fight raspberry pie - like I've got here or whatever the latest flavor is. I bet there's a lot of people out there who bought one of these things because hey, it's a cool little Linux computer, you know? and it's super duper cheap. But there's probably a lot of these lying around doing nothing, just going to waste. So I thought that was a bit of a shame.

So I thought hmm I've got a couple of these lying around the lab. What can I do with them? Can I do anything useful I know? let's look for aliens. Why? Because aliens? Let's go. I've got a Raspberry Pi - I've got it all hooked up.

Let's see if we can find ourself some aliens. Beauty: As you might know, the Raspberry Pi - I've got here uses a fairly powerful Broadcom ARM processor and this particular one actually has four cores and it works close to one gig or thereabout. so it's a pretty powerful beast. Not in terms not really, you know, like Pc powerful, but in terms of power per what? IE mips per what processing power per what? It's a pretty decent device, so I thought we'd see how well this thing does with blink.

Whoa. What's point? Let's find out. Yeah, for those curious to know how I'm gonna do this, I'm actually taking the HDMI video output of the Raspberry Pi here. I'm feeding it through my AVerMedia Live Gamer portable so that captures the the HDMI signal.

I've got myself a mic plugged into this thing so let's go straight to the Video Capture beauty. Now before we get into SETI Aliens Boink. End of all People Paul Horowitz I Thought we'd just fix something really annoying. here.

you notice a black border around the screen here. This is not a problem with my screen capture. this is actually an out-of-the-box problem with the Raspberry Pi or more specifically, the Noob version, at least of the Raspbian OS that I'm running here so it's I need to fix it. It's bugging me now.

This is actually a problem with over scanning designed for TVs and things like that and we can fix that by going into the boot operating system and the configure txt file here. Now if you take a look at the settings here, we've got our over scan things. These are come in and out, but there are default settings for over scan and over scans actually turned on by default and this is an old-style thing designed to fix problems with you know, old TV sets and and monitors and things like that, but modern LCDs and and monitors and TVs you don't need this so I don't know why it's turned on by default. it's just really annoying.

Anyway, we can fix it so it seems I can't use the editor that come with the Raspberry Pi to do that. It won't let me save the file so that's interesting. So we can use the command-line Sudo Nano boot slash config TST I know you want to get to the aliens I know I know. But let's go down here and let's disable overscan Shall we? There we go.

So let's reboot this puppy and see if we can fix it and twiddling thumbs. Oh pretty. I Have no idea what any of that does. Hmm, ah, that's much better.

Now we can get back to aliens Now how are we going to use our Raspberry Pi to search for aliens is to use the SETI at home system. Now this is not new. It started in about 1999 coincidentally, um, sadly. Prince just died today.

So yeah, let's party like it's 1999. Let's go crazy. find some aliens, shall we? It was an initiative to try and utilize people's home computers that were just sitting there basically doing nothing most of the time. all that CPU horsepower sitting there doing nothing, just idle in a way waiting for you to do your word processor or surf the web or something like that and all that processing power going to waste.

So why not use it to actually do some science and process data? Because SETI requires massive amounts of data to be processed, massive bandwidths of data to search for all the different frequency bins, and FFTs and do everything else. So they thought, hey, if we can probably get you know 50,000 computers or something like that at the time, then it can. you know really have a very significant impact on this science of actually searching through out signals. So so they developed software called Boink.

Yes, that's how you pronounce it I Believe it stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and what it is is a program that just ties all of all computers together and shares processing tasks between them. You know that it will send you a little chunk of data to play with and then you use your car idle time on your computer to solve it and then sends the result back. But it's not just for it. started out just a city, but now Boink actually supports a whole host of different art science projects, which we might have a quick look at later, but you can contribute to dozens and dozens of different scientific endeavors.

With the Boink software, it's available for Windows. It's available for UNIX and Mac and also for your out phone as well. If your Android phone, you can get an app. so when your phone's doing nothing, it can do some processing as well.

And the thing is, they've just released the latest version of it and the latest version released includes support for the Raspberry Pi for ARM processors. In fact, it's not just for the Raspberry Pi. It should in theory work on many different Arm embedded platforms if it uses a specific type of interface which the Raspberry Pi you know software type interface which the rubbery Raspberry Pi does now. I've always been interested in the city at home thing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I never got around to really trying it.

but I was spurred on after watching this up. Paul Horowitz Yes, of Art of Electronics fame, he's actually one of the pioneering researchers on SETI Not many people know that although it's in the back blurb of the book, I think um, and he's gave a great fantastic talk at Google about that. SETI research old computers and and Cal can ballpark. back-of-the-envelope calculations is brilliant.

Just watch it. I'll link it in down below we what we need to do is we need to download and install the one for the Raspberry Pi So we're going to open a terminal window here and we have to do some fancy pantsy commands, but we can install it I've already installed the software on here I've already actually created a city at Home account on my Windows PC I Just did that first. You don't I Don't believe you have to do it in this particular audio can just do it on the Raspberry Pi. But just be aware that I've already created accounts.

so I have login credentials on the city at home at work. So what we want to do is we actually want to install the Boink client software. This will install as a daemon on there as on the Linux on the Raspberry Pi By the way, I'm using Raspbian. the Raspbian new install the latest one available today I don't know what version it is and we do this using the Sudo Apt-get install, Blink client command.

It'll go away and automatically find that so if we type that in it'll download, it's reading the package download it's installing and after there will be used pre configuring package blah blah blah and it should ask us, are we sure I know, Come on, come on, you can do it. So there you have it, It's installed the Point client no problems and also that will automatically load and read the configure of the point configuration file. And for the CD at Home project and for any other scientific projects you want to run on here as well, it doesn't as I said, doesn't have to be at SETI at home, but that's what we're running today. Now we want to actually do exactly the same thing again, but we don't understand the Point client.

We want to install Boink and this installs the Point GUI Manager software which we can play around with at a GUI level which is just nice to be able to change settings and things like that. so install that one as well. Twiddle our thumbs and we'll come back. Doesn't take long.

Do you want to continue? You bet your ass. I Want to continue 6 Meg Yeah geez, When I was a boy, let's go crazy and we're done Now for all you come online aficionados, we can actually go in and use the command line to do everything. so we can use the Boink Command command line program and we can install projects. So whether you know in this case, Arts City at home and we can attach projects and we can do all sorts of stuff and set up all our parameters and do everything else.

But and that's just near to hard. So let's go in here and we should find that now over here in System Tools we've got the Blink manager Beautiful! Let's load that up. And just as a little aside, if you want to find out what temperature your ours berry Pie process is running it, you can do that at thirty seven point nine degrees. but we're doing.

You can see the processing bar up here. we're doing bugger-all because we're just running the GUI only like using a couple of percent of our processor. but when we run the boy software, it can be up to a hundred percent. We can set how much of the processor we utilize and the process to make it a bit warm scheme.

And here's our Boink Manager and I've already because I've already got an account attached. It looks like it automatically. Even though I reinstall the software, it did go back to where I came from, so obviously uninstalling the thing didn't get rid of some things. So I am actually still attached here, so let me kill that and we'll do it from scratch.

But first, one thing we want to do is run the CPU benchmarks to actually find out how fast our boinc thinks that this Raspberry Pi actually is and you run it and you think it's nowhere. but you have to actually go over here into the event log to actually find the results. It's currently running the CPU benchmarks and we'll do floating-point tests. It'll do energy tests and give you a result in MIPS dry stones.

You know all your standard benchmarking stuff I'm not sure of the exact algorithm it's actually using there, but it'll give us a figure of how fast this Raspberry Pi's and then we can compare it with my jewel Z on desktop and PC and is 292 floating-point MIPS Wheatstone's per CPU But remember, we've actually got four CPUs and you saw before how we actually had four tasks running at once. So it's actually going to run one task per CPU And it's got eleven hundred and Sixty-one Energy Mips dry stones per CPU And this is drastically less than what I get on my twelve core dual processor Xeon machine. but that's to be expected. This thing's drawing bugger-all power and my Xeon processor in a ton of power.

But hey, if it's it's all about the processing power per watt essentially. So what we want to do is go in here and add a project. So and here's all the different projects I Told you about that you can get with point. Asteroids are homies searching that's not playing asteroids.

a game that's actually processing searching for astronauts. The asteroids. The Atlas Our thing for the CERN Large Hadron Collider You can do some processing for that citizen science grid. high-energy physics.

You can do what climate prediction, modeling and stuff like that for global warming and other stuff you can do. you know, mathematics nerds do various things. cosmology at home Einstein at home which is a gravitational wave detector and you can like be involved in not just one you can actually be. you know you can dedicate one CPU per task if you wanted to.

You know if you're a fan of all these things, but look how many different things you can do. It's just absolutely incredible. So we're going to choose Art SETI at home and because we want to find aliens? Yeah, absolutely it's going to happen one day. I Think we're gonna find something? So anyway, yes, I'm an existing user so I will go in there and set up my account, but you can actually create a new account here.

No problems at all. so if we can, there you go project added click to finish and that's it. Bingo! We've got city at home and it's essentially ready to go. as you can see our processor bar at the top only join 2% cuz we haven't actually started this thing yet because it's in that suspend mode here.

so for the activity. but if we just go, run. Bingo. But now our processor should or it's got to download the tasks and things like that first.

So let's go in and have a look at the tasks here and so it might take some time to actually configure the thing. That's why it's only drawing like a quarter because it's only running one task on one core here. so we need to set this up. I Think it could take actually some time to do that.

We can actually go into tools and computing preferences here and we can set up for how much processor power we actually use. And it's very powerful. You can only run it on certain times and dates and things like that. when you can set it to slow down or disable when you run applicate, you know when you're running applications, so it'll only do process and when you're idle, it's incredibly powerful.

This point software. My hats off to the people who wrote this thing. It's incriminate. Well, while the computer is, don't run up while the computer is on batteries and all that's it.

You know, computing allowed violence on batteries and all that sort of stuff. While computer is in use, Well, GPU is in use. that's for you.make, Pcs and things like that. So while processor is usage is less than 25% All that sort of jazz fantastic.

and then you can set if you've got. If you live in a shitty country well, a great country like Australia which has shitty internet then and you've got bandwidth caps as almost every plane internet plan in Australia does. whether it's mobile, home broadband, whatever they've got. even at my lab here paying 400 bucks a month from my internet Here for my 20 Meg 20 May connection I'm limited to like I Think it's a 500 gig month, so you know it can add up.

Do the math in terms of bandwidth. The bandwidth requirements of this thing is reasonably small, but if you leave it running 24/7 even you know 50 or 100 kilobytes per second. running 24/7 can chew large amounts of bandwidth, so just be careful there. Now we can set up how much disk and memory users use at most one gig of disk space on the raspberry I wouldn't use it? Well, maybe if you're dedicating your raspberry pi just to doing this, you can set up and use as much as you want, but you know you might only set one gig or something like that, use at most nine percent of total disk space, etc.

etc. But and then you can exclude applications so you can stop it working when applications boot and all sorts of stuff. It's great. And if you actually hit the Preferences button down here, it takes you over to the Seti At Home website where you've actually created an account and you can actually set up global things for the computers, all of the different computers on your network and things like that.

So I can this is my actual account here and I can not set things up so I can go in here and check it out. Here we go, let's have a look and we can go into computers on this account and I'm going to have a look and these are the different computers that I've got running. This is the Raspberry Pi that we've set up. There's my lab machine that I made Jules Zeon machine here in that stive had I've only had that running basically a for yesterday and I've already accumulated a total credit over three thousand, seven hundred and 99 which is it's getting there.

not bad for a day's use and I've only view up that set to like 20 percent of my process in idle or something like that. That's my Android phone down here, so once again, it hasn't actually completed a task yet. So I only installed that one last night and had it running overnight, but it hasn't finished the tasks. This is my other laptop at home once again.

I've only set these up last night. I mean our Raspberry Pi hasn't earned any credit yet. Pretty is processing in the background tells us it uses an arm. It's got four processors.

Last access to all that sort of stuff. It's fantastic. And then we can have a look at the individual tasks that this thing is scheduled for. So these are the tasks.

so I'm not sure I don't think it's actually as I said, it hasn't uh yet. There we go. It showed up okay. it just took some time for these extra tasks to actually show up.

So a 0.2% of this task now and we have a deadline of the 14th of June to finish this task by, we've been allocated this task, our little Raspberry Pi has been allocated this and if it doesn't finish then I Don't know. you might get penalized in terms of your ranking and stuff like that on the city Network and stuff like that. but we have that time to do it. I Think it'll do Rory up to 0.9 percent I Think we'll be there by the 14th of June No worries whatsoever and there you go.

We've got four different tasks running on four different calls on our Raspberry Pi our Raspberry Pi and you'll notice we're now up to a hundred percent up here, so our Ausbury Pi might get a little bit slow so we might want to knock that processing power back to ninety percent or something just so we can do some things in the background. As you can see, it does. Still, the browser still works and everything like that, even with a hundred percent CPU utilization that we're actually seeing up there. So that's actually very impressive on the part of the Raspberry Pi It's not a fast you know computer by any means, but it it still does the business so it works really well.

Today we are now searching for aliens using our Raspberry Pi maxing it out I'll just sit here and wait for the signal to come through. Feel like Jodie Foster Contact Now Unfortunately, the boink build for the raspberry pie art does not include the graphics. Normally we could actually select a task here and we can hit this show graphics button like this and it pops up with all the funky stuff like we get on the desktop and other versions. so unfortunately they haven't included that, they just I Guess they just decided that you know it was, they haven't tested it yet.

I Actually talked to the guys on the forum who were actually developing this and did the raspberry pie version. By the way, there is an excellent community over here which end message board and forum and everything else and they helped me so thank you very much. I Getting this thing up and running had a little bit of issue at first, but it's it is actually as easy as I've shown here and I'm just on my desktop here which is a dual processor our Xeon machine you've seen before. This is what I do all my video rendering on.

Its got like 128 gigs of ram and it's absolutely crazy. It does actually support 24 virtual work cause but I've actually restricted it to to the 12 physical cause 6 per processor and you can see that's actually running 12 tasks here. And as I mentioned before, there is some funky graphics which automatically installs is your screen saver by the way which is that fantastic. So we can choose this task here and let me drag it in and this is what it looks like.

This is what it looks like. Isn't that funky? You can get different types of screens. hang on, wait, wait for it, wait for it. you can.

You know you can pan it around and stuff like that. It's great. Here we go. so it's it's doing.

the frequency bins a resolution of eighty Nine Point Four Hertz I don't know how to stop it spinning actually 20 Resolution: 22 Hertz and things like that, it's the it is fantastic. Base Frequency six Point seven, five gig There you go. This is this: Data was recorded at the Green Bank telescope receiver for underscore six and it's got all that when the data was actually recorded January sixteenth. So we're processing well.

We start us out searching for pulses, triplets, Doppler drift rate and it's I Can sit and watch this all day so we're almost done so we're almost gonna get credit on our thing there. So I just love that I Just love that feature. It's just absolutely terrific. So that.

that graphic feature has said it's not on the Raspberry Pi though. So yeah. I don't know, hasil the guys on the forum and maybe though included, it's like a library. The library file isn't there, it hasn't been tested.

it's not included in the build and stuff like that. So yep, we are almost done and we can show all the tasks. You can actually show the tasks that these are the tasks that are upcoming ones that are being assigned and this one actually is set to use my GPU So I've got a Radeon R 290 I think it is graphics card in here. Fairly fairly decent graphics card in the thing.

And yeah, these are all this tasks which are lined up for the thing. but that's brilliant. So this is Screaming Thrill. Let's do a little bit of a power comparison.

MIPS per watt comparison, shall we? Wow Check it out. That's incredible. 370 What's that's drawing on a hundred percent utilization? almost? You know, practically 100% utilization on all those 12 cause of my dual Xeon processor. But that includes all the computer overhead as well.

the hard drives. All that sort of jazz as well. But still, that is what the system takes. 370 watts.

Here's the power consumption of the Raspberry Pi cranking all four cores at a hundred percent. There you go where you know, what is it? Let's say 2.3 What? Two point it's jumping around. I'm gonna say Let's say Two point? three, four arguments Satan So have a very quick look at the numbers here. The Raspberry Pi two of course was had a much lower MIPS per watt in both floating-point and integer, but it drew much much less power.

Point: Seven, five watts per core compared to thirty point eight watts per core. But of course the Xeon is cores are faster. But if you actually do the numbers and calculate the Esper What? The Raspberry Pi 2 is five to eight times more efficient than the Xeon processors. and that's that's pretty incredible.

You know that is a lot. So if you're going to do this sort of thing, you wouldn't use these Xeon processors. Of course this is just based on the you know, the benchmark. You know floating point integer calculations, but you know that's a decent ballpark.

you can work with five to eight times more efficient Raspberry Pi So hey, build a Raspberry Pi cluster. Go for it. Better than this dual processor Xeon Okay, so the Intel Xeon is not exactly no one has an efficient processor, so you know maybe that's not a fair comparison. Might be fairer to compare it with, say, a modern core I7, which are you know quite efficient in, especially compared to the Xeon so I'm led to believe.

But if anyone's got any data on that, comparing the Raspberry Pi to to the AI Sevens, I'd like to see it posted down below. So there you have it. We're using a Raspberry Pi for something useful doing scientific research. this is also, rather than just flashing a stupid LED or something like that.

Well, that's okay for you know, just having to play around. But yeah, I like this. I Think my next step is going to have to create like a Raspberry Pi cluster and you know how many of these things will I need? And I don't know I could write like I could probably run set one up as a separate board like a separate computer in each one. Whether that's the most efficient way to do it, or whether or not there are ways to, you know a lot of people are building these Raspberry Pi cluster supercomputers and things like that in this software.

I Believe that ties are more together and treats them as like a thousand core machine. So technically it might only show up as one computer. so I'm not sure which way would actually be better to run. If you've got any info on that, please leave it in the comments down below, but you can certainly hook.

You know you just sit a thousand of these in a rack, pair arm up, hook up a thousand Ethernet cables and Bob's your uncle and configure each one as a separate computer on the city network. But yeah, the Raspberry Pi isn't that powerful on its own. but hey, MIPS but what? Pretty decent and by the way, all the settings that we actually do in here, all the properties and everything else processing power. all that sort of stuff will automatically save to a config file and that config file will be read by the daemon that automatically loads when we restart the Raspberry Pi every time.

so we don't actually have to run this point manager here. the Raspberry Pi will just automatically boot up and you'll see the hundred percent processing up here when you restarted. So my hats off to everyone that said E at Home I'll link in another video to the creator of CD At Home down below. It's an excellent YouTube by interview with him, so watch that down below.

Highly recommended. So there you have it. That's how do you use your Raspberry Pi to search for aliens or do any other scientific research I Highly recommend it. If you've got one lying around, then just set it up and just leave it running in the background.

It takes bugger-all power really in the scheme of things and it just feels good knowing that you're actually contributing to. you know, proper scientific research beauty. Anyway, if you want to discuss a TV blog forum, all that sort of stuff, link down below and we know they're out there. It's just a matter of listening.

Catch you next time! Hi! This is the new Raspberry Pi 2 just released very recently and a user by the name of Peter Onion discovered something very interesting with this board. Let's take a photo of this lovely little board with a camera with a Zen on photo flash on it. Here we go. Oops, Look what happened.

We have just reset. not only reset our board, but we've actually locked it up. It is no longer working at all. To get it working again, we have to repower the thing.

what's going on. Well, it's actually pretty darn obvious.