I recently purchased 2 raspberry pi’s online. My first project is kind of a prototype of various things. I wanted the flexibility to multi-boot the device so Berry Boot was a must.
After looking around for a USB Hard drive that I could power solely on the pi I stumbled on something great. Old Ipods have mini hard drives in them. After a quick search on ebay I found a Zif to USB adapter. Now these little Toshiba hard drives run on 3.3v at 500ma, so I had to up the power to get this running solely from the pi. I dug in my box of assorted old wall warts and pulled out a nice 5v 2a. I ran over to Radio Shack and found a replacement micro usb connection. It soldered perfectly to the cable and after some electrical tape and a glob of hot glue my new power source was ready.
Berryboot makes multi booting easy. I simply copied over the files to a regular sd card formatted in fat32 and I was ready to go. First up was running firmware updates. Because I bought the rev1 version of the 512 raspi I had to update the firmware to take advantage of the 512mb of ram. After that I installed Raspbian, OpenElec, and RetroPie.
The plan now is to learn how to program the GPIO to accept a Infrared sensor so I can use my cheap all purpose remote for XBMC.
