Having made the decisions about the design of the feeder I needed to begin getting the basics of the pi set up together.

AS I’m going to be using RISC OS there are a couple of hurdles to overcome that aren’t present in linux.

The shopping list for the pi setup is:
1 – Remote access for running the program (or monitoring if autonomous).
2 – Wireless networking.
3 – Sending or recording video.
4 – Get it working from battery power.

Before I get to running wirelessly I thought I’d begin with accessing the pi from a remote computer using its current remote connection – For this I used the VNC server by Adrian Lees – http://adrianl.drobe.co.uk/
He describes this as a shaky alpha release but, while a bit slow, it is perfect for running my basic program.

I accessed it from the laptop using tightVNC which provided a good & stable connection. The pi is set up to display on my tv using hdmi and I didn’t want to fiddle with the screen resolution, so I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t like running at 256 colours.