Well, if I were to put a positive spin on things, I would describe my results so far as 'mixed'.
I began by unboxing everything and putting the Pi in its case. I opted for the same case as Martin (I think) - the
Pibow Ninja - just because it looks pretty spiffy (simpler designs can be had for half the price).
Assembling it around the Pi was straightforward enough:
The many pieces of the case:
Protective cellophane removed:
The pieces are individually numbered, and the Pi sits on top of 0, 1, & 2:
Then pieces 3-9 rest on top, and the whole thing is fastened by four plastic screws:
Next I prepared the Micro SD card. This involved the following steps:
1) Inserting the card - via the SD card adapter - into my laptop, where it was detected and assigned a drive label.
2) Downloading and extracting the
RuneAudio img file.
3) Downloading and installing
Win32DiskImager - a utility which can write a raw disk image to a removable drive.
4) With Disk Imager, writing the img file to the MicroSD card - this took a little under a minute.
Once this was done, I removed the card from its adapter, and plugged it into the front of the Pi:
As per the
RuneAudio instructions, before powering on, I plugged the relevant peripherals into the Pi, which - in my case - is just the ethernet cable, and the USB-S/PDIF coverter:
So, with all this connected, I plugged in the power connector, and the red LED - which indicates that the Pi is drawing power - lit up:
"Success!" I thought. But then I noticed that the lights beneath the ethernet port - which I was expecting to flash - weren't doing anything. I then waited a little, in case it needed some time to sort itself out, and still nothing. Unsurprisingly, the Pi wasn't showing up on the list of attached network devices. So I removed the power, formatted the MicroSD card (with
this application) and rewrote the RuneAudio img file, plugged the card back into the Pi, and tried again. Again, the power LED lit up, but nothing else happened.
My first thought was that perhaps the current version of RuneAudio - dated February of this year - does not get along with the more recently released B+ board. I looked for a reference to the B+ on Rune's site, and found
this, where a user mentions that the new alpha version
does work with the B+. So I thought I'd download this and give it a go. But then the download was set to take ages, so I thought that, in the mean time, I'd try Volumio, since Martin hadn't had any problems getting it to work with his B+. So again, I formatted the MicroSD card, and this time wrote the Volumio img file, plugged the card into the Pi and powered on. This time there was a little more LED activity - the red LED came on as before, and the adjacent green LED was flashing, indicating that the card was being read. Also, the ethernet LEDs flashed briefly - a good sign, I thought.
But once this flurry of activity was over, the ethernet LEDs went dark, and aside from some intermittent flashing from the green LED, I was back where I was before. I checked to see if the Pi had turned up on the list of attached devices, and it hadn't. I also tried the browser links on
Volumio page, which - if the Pi had made it onto the network - should have allowed me to access and operate it via the Web GUI. No joy.
So, I retried this couple of times - in case there had been an error writing the img file - and then tried writing just
a basic operating system to the card, and this didn't work either.
Having looked at some troubleshooting guides, it seems the Pi's can be a little pernickety over MicroSD cards, and there's a
working list of ones which - for whatever reason - the Pi won't play with.
My hypothesis then is that the Pi doesn't like
the card that I'm using - either that, or the board itself may be faulty.
Martin, please could you link me to the card that you used, since at least we know that that should work? I'll grab one and retry!
If anyone has any other ideas about what I could be doing wrong here, please do chip in
