While Raspberry Pi certainly is a cheap mini-computer, adding accessories to it blows up ownership costs a lot. While adding WiFi is relatively cheap, finding a compatible Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 (BLE) for a bargain is hard. Luckily, I found the Orico BTA-403 Mini Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter Dongle which comes with CSR8510 Low Energy Chip and is compatible with Linux and Raspberry Pi despite being not listed as such in the description, this is certainly a must-have deal for $8 including worldwide shipping. Instructions for setup are as shared below.

Combine the awesomeness of Apple's Siri voice recognition capability with ability to tap into it using SiriProxy, and our favorite hacker friendly mini Linux computer Raspberry Pi and we have an excellent voice controlled home automation system which runs 24/7 waiting for voice commands to do assigned tasks. To get this super-geeky project working we need to install and configure SiriProxy on our Raspberry Pi setup, follow the instructions shared below to install SiriProxy on the official Raspbian “wheezy” distribution.

Making life easier for Raspberry Pi users, the core team has announced a new, feature packed "Raspberry Pi Recovery System" aptly named New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS). The utility allows users to select and install operating systems for the Raspberry Pi on an SD card without technical details like partitioning or card imaging.

The Recovery system creates a FAT partition on user supplied SD card with highly-compressed versions of various supported OS images like Raspbian, RaspBMC, Pidora, OpenELEC, ArchLinux and RiscOS. Just like recovery apps for Mac OS X the RasPi recovery allows users to press SHIFT while booting to launch it and use features like ability to easily reinstall the existing OS, install a different one, launch web-browser for online support or edit config.txt file using a handy editor for troubleshooting.

Kali Linux the new version of popular advanced penetration testing and security auditing Linux distribution Backtrack is now available as an ready to flash official image for Raspberry Pi. The convergence of portable mini computing power of Raspberry Pi and 300+ open-source penetration testing tools provided by Kali Linux makes them a killer combination. We have already seen how raspi-config utility proves to be a must have tool for essential tweaks to Raspberry Pi, sadly installing and using the same on Kali Linux requires some extra bit of efforts as shown ahead.

We have already setupped the Raspberry Pi to download files from internet and share them wirelessly over network acting as an NAS. Now it's time to further enhance this functionality to share multimedia content (audio/video/images) using DLNA protocol so our Raspberry Pi can act as an self contained multimedia downloader and server.

Enabling DLNA allows compatible networked device like TV's, cellphones, music systems and computers to enable seamless sharing and playback of digital media between devices. DLNA uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) for media management, discovery and control. Follow the instructions ahead to install and configure popular Linux DLNA server utility MiniDLNA on Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

In search for the most stable yet low resource consuming download accelerator for my Raspberry Pi NAS, we have tested and written about excellent utilities like Transmission Bittorrent Client, pyLoad and FatRat which gets the job done. However, after extensive testing with all these I can now easily conclude that the best download manager for Raspberry Pi (or any other low-resourced Linux computer) is - aria2.

aria2 is an versatile multi-platform, multi-protocol download accelerator with lots of powerful features not available in any of the competing applications like the ability to download the same file from multiple URLS and protocols. Aria2 is available for Linux, Windows and Mac and supports multi-protocol, multi-segmented parallel accelerated downloads from HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,BitTorrent and Metalink protocols with download resume capability. Despite being a lightweight command line utility, you won't feel the lack of an GUI as it supports an XML-RPC interface for remote-control - there are quite a few handy GUI's available like web-interfaces, desktop clients and native mobile applications.

We can launch applications and scripts as services during boot at various Linux run-levels as demonstrated earlier, however at-times we need to launch applications or perform scripted tasks only after the Graphical interface is loaded. For example in my usage scenario with Debian running on a Raspberry Pi, few services were failing to work as expected when launched using inti.d method as they require the host to be properly connected to the internet which only happened (in my usage scenario) after the GUI started loading.

Here is another handy way to auto-launch applications and scripts in a similar manner to "autostart" in Windows, we will be using LXDE "/home/pi/.config/autostart" folder to create shortcuts which will launch our executable after GUI starts loading.

Users world-over are tweaking there way into Raspberry Pi making multitudes of things, like low energy consuming dedicated downloader, media center, Network Attached File-server (NAS), weather station, home-automation and robotics. To do all this tinkering, you will frequently need to make sure applications are launched when the Raspberry Pi is restarted.

Follow this simple tutorial to create services which will automatically launch at Debian boot. We will be using the Linux standard init.d method to launch our applications as services during various run-levels.

In it's simplest definition watchdog is a hardware and/or software timer-register which can used to trigger an system reset or action if something doesn’t works as expected. The watchdog timer performs regular heartbeat checks and if failed performs the pre-defined corrective tasks.

The now hugely popular mini-computer Raspberry Pi features the BCM2835 SoC which has an built-in hardware watchdog timer, this can be used to check tasks like network connectivity, system load, system freeze and other metrics like temperature to perform corrective measures like automatic system reset. Just follow the steps as instructed next to get started with using watchdog timer.

Majority of the users must be using their little Raspberry Pi computer headless (without any keyboard, mouse or display attached), and while SSH is a great option for Linux users feeling comfortable with command line other users need an graphical user interface. Here is an quick tutorial to remotely access your Raspberry Pi's desktop remotely over an network.