@ ratronic
re:Advanced Options select Serial and disable the shell's use of the serial port.
Yes, I knew I had to do it but doing a search to see how (I think it's because it was assigned to the GPIO pins) I did find a script to do it however, the menu option is much easier thanks!!
@mindrobots
re:Bob, did you add your user to the group that owns the serial ports?
No , not yet, I didn't know about it or even how to do it. I thought that the current owner would have access?
At least the port is opening now and I get " no propeller chip on port '/dev/ttyAMAO' "
If you use the serial port to down load to the Propeller it needs at least one more GPIO pin to toggle reset. Bill Henning has his boards set up this way. If you
want to just see it work using a USB cable make sure the device setting at the top right of the screen is set to /dev/ttyUSB0 before you load.
That got it Thanks! for the help. I now have a beautiful blue flashing LED on running on the PPDB with a few lines of Spin code. I wanted to try some C but I'm not feeling well enough tonight to tackle it.
You can still get use from the serial port on the Pi. Right now I am playing around with a C++ program on the Pi sending out data collected from Opencv to the
Propeller @ 115200 baud through Propeller port pins using C and Spin.
I won't be able to network mine consistently, until I get a wi-fi solution. Recommendations welcome. Hoping I can get something retail, and I don't care if it's not the cheapest.
It's installing all Raspian now. Had trouble writing the image, so I punted and took the NOOBS path.
For the very short term, I just need the Propeller IDE and info on the serial port found on the Pi. I've a little project to start with that will use a Propeller and serial.
No network isn't going to cut it, due to likely dependencies I see. So, looks like I'll go haul it out to the living room where my one ethernet port lives. Will be kind of funny to run this tiny thing on a big plasma.
BTW: I tried a cheap-o Logitech keyboard with trackpad combo, and it works great, and it's wireless with one of those little receivers that can present both keyboard and mouse on one USB port. Spiffy!
The MicroSD isn't very fast though. 1.5Mb/s Could be worse... Will be enough, once it's loaded up.
I won't be able to network mine consistently, until I get a wi-fi solution. Recommendations welcome. Hoping I can get something retail, and I don't care if it's not the cheapest.
It's installing all Raspian now. Had trouble writing the image, so I punted and took the NOOBS path.
For the very short term, I just need the Propeller IDE and info on the serial port found on the Pi. I've a little project to start with that will use a Propeller and serial.
No network isn't going to cut it, due to likely dependencies I see. So, looks like I'll go haul it out to the living room where my one ethernet port lives. Will be kind of funny to run this tiny thing on a big plasma.
BTW: I tried a cheap-o Logitech keyboard with trackpad combo, and it works great, and it's wireless with one of those little receivers that can present both keyboard and mouse on one USB port. Spiffy!
The MicroSD isn't very fast though. 1.5Mb/s Could be worse... Will be enough, once it's loaded up.
That was the number on the installation screen. I'll need to test it in the running environment. The boot seemed much quicker. No way that was ~1Mb/sec Bet you are right. In the few things I did, whatever the speed was, it was plenty.
Any reason to go with just the Raspian image, or just add on to this? Seems clean and simple enough. I'm not too picky.
I guess what I'm really asking is whether or not I'm on some bastardized track with the NOOBS setup. I want the usual apt get and friends to just work. I tried to write the Raspian image from a Mac twice. No go. Something basic wrong there, and I didn't want to track it down.
Yeah, I'll have mine connected to a huge TV for a little while tonight or maybe early in the morning. Long enough to fetch the goodies needed for a Prop and maybe a few other nice things, depending.
I'm off to look for the best way to connect to the PPDB. That's what I need to do, after getting the Prop basics setup. I've an immediate need to work with a Prop, serial comms, and some automation gear sitting on my desk. I'll get the PropGCC and other goodies setup as I move projects off the really old, really cranky, "need to start it with an air can" T60P, running XP! (yeah, I know, but it had a ton of stuff, and well, I just kept it off the net)
Hey, this is a great little computer! It's really nice to be in Linux land. Too bad I can't yet take Sublime with me yet. Tell everybody you know to pester that guy. Maybe he can use the glshim package to bridge the gap between GL and GLes.
At the bog standard, default speeds, I'm largely happy. It's honestly about as quick as my workhorse Linux box was in the mid 00's. And it's tiny and cheaper than the keyboard I bought for that thing long ago, and it's got two more cores! Amazing.
Of course, I did this because I can make a big mistake, blow it up, pull another one outta the box, and go. Nice.
Picked up one of the recommended wifi adapters (not the RPi logo'd one, which is weak) which seems to work quite well.
Only problem is runing speedof.me speed test, I seem to max at about 2Mb.
Woah, just happened to run it on the couch Mac, and my Comcast is showing 96Mb down, 13Mb up. And we have the normal mid-range package...
My older 8GB uSD is also only about 8-10Mb.
I am running the new stripped down Diet-Pi Raspbian image. About 360Mb I believe.
Just trying to find my old OCZ Vertex 2 64GB SSD and a powered USB2 hub. Should help the filesystem keep up with that quad-core.
Looking to make this into a small, 24x7 Master for some remote Adafruit Trinket and MSP430 motes. Was going to use a Prop for that, however this was a faster/lazier way of just getting it going.
My SD is 8 to 10 Mb / sec. I'll grumble about that on setup, but otherwise, I'm happy.
Got the software up and the Prop IDE guide is spiffy. Well done.
I'll do Simple IDE and friends shortly. When I get the wi-fi, so I'm not tethered by a cable for it.
Now it's down to connecting up a prop. Tomorrow.
Thanks for the help and chatter. I really had very little trouble. Looks like I will be off line with it, until a WiFi piece shows up. Got enough on there to continue and that was the goal for now.
I kind of want to make a little machine case. Keyboard, smallish display, power, battery, disks.
I read about analog display out being possible. Doing that is on the list as is composite.
No idea about noobs, never seen it. I'd be inclined to keep shouting at the mac until it can dd raspbian onto an SD.
I too have wondered about Sublime. That would be great.
Performance, I geeked out a bit last Saturday (Pi Day) and calculated 50 million digits of Pi on the Pi. That kind of lines up with the world record in 1986 for the number of digits calculated which was 67 million. The record was held by a Hitachi HITAC S-810/20 vector super http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/super/0007.html
The CRAY-2 held the world record of 29 million decimal places in 1986. We have that handsomely beaten by the Pi.
The next, and last Cray record was 480 million places in 1989. That huge increase was more to do with the clever algorithm developed by the brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky than any speed up in the CRAY.
Now, the Pi won't do 100 million places as it runs out of RAM. But it may be feasible to put some swap space on there and get to there and perhaps even to the 480 million places record.
That would be fitting as I'm using the gmp-chudnovsky code to do this.
Yes, I'm using the Canakit Wifi adaptor with Pi2. It's based on the Ralink RT5370 chipset chipset . It works so well I haven't even tried the Ethernet cable yet.
So, Doug, Rick, what do you think of the RPi setup for Prop? Are the materials easily found, are the instructions and documentation clear?
Do you think that anybody could follow the instructions and consistently get the identical, successful result?
If we gave the instructions to a teacher and 28 students, would they all be up and running by the end of the week?
I have variations of these chipsets running (found via lsusb):
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter - generic plug with an external antenna (cool!) (from Ebay)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter - little generic black plug labeled 802.11n (from Ebay)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter - this one is packaged as a Wi-Pi (cute - from MCM/Element-14)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 7392:7811 Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS] (Official Edimax purchased from Amazon)
Basically two different chipsets in a bunch of different packaging options. I imagine you should be able to find one of these in a dongle from a local source. The package should list the chipset.
That's what is currently on my WiFi network. There's another one out there but he isn't talking today. I guess I need to go troubleshooting.
So, Doug, Rick, what do you think of the RPi setup for Prop? Are the materials easily found, are the instructions and documentation clear?
Do you think that anybody could follow the instructions and consistently get the identical, successful result?
If we gave the instructions to a teacher and 28 students, would they all be up and running by the end of the week?
I would think so. Actually, I would HOPE so. It's pretty simple with the instructions.
I haven't followed the instructions in a long time. I think the Raspberry Pi Foundation has good instructions and I also think Adafruit has good instructions. Those are the ones I remember using. Now, if I'm setting one up and either have a senior moment or hit a snag, I usually go to Raspberrypi.org to refresh my memory or browse the forums.
I think if you give someone a Pi, a keyboard, a monitor and a NOOBS SD card, they should be able to handle it. If it is an ethernet connection then you are done. If it is WiFi, they will of course need SSID and password info.
Edit: I could not promise identical. Once the kids figure out you can change your computer's name through raspi-config, I'm sure any "identical" will go right out the window!
Edit2: I'd make the SD cards for them the first time. As Doug (no, the other Doug) found out, sometimes creating an image can throw a wrench in the works. I spent a considerable amount of time once just to find out that Mac Minis have issues with the Read-Only switch on their SD slots - nobody needs that frustration. No point wasting time with that for the first set-up. That can be a lesson later on in the course once they have had some fun! You want a quick and painless time to first GUI (MPTTFG for you metrics people!)
Edit3: Didn't read your question closely. Raspberry Pi [highlight]for PROP[/highlight], I skipped over the "for PROP". For that, I need to go back and see if I made any notes. If I made notes, there generally was some sort of issue. No notes? No issues! Off the top of my head, I think both SimpleIDE and PropellerIDE installations worked as advertised and instructed.
So, Doug, Rick, what do you think of the RPi setup for Prop? Are the materials easily found, are the instructions and documentation clear?
Do you think that anybody could follow the instructions and consistently get the identical, successful result?
This is a very open question, are you asking about a SimpleIDE install for the Raspi? If it is for SimpleIDE, then the Learn site is the place to go, it has very explicit instructions. The only problem that I have with it, it is SimpleIDE 0-9-45, the latest version that is available is 1.0 RC2, which is only available for Windows and Mac. The other problem is that these versions do not use the latest propGCC build, there have been improvements.
I did notice that there is some work being done to make available the latest propGCC build, but at this time I would not recommend an attempt to do an install, you have to really be an expert, not a student or a novice.
So, at this point, you could go to the Learn site, do the SimpleIDE 0-9-45 version install and get a feel for the software, and then wait ...
If you are working from a Mac you don't need any SD card fromating tool. Just use the dd command. You have to make sure the SD is not mounted first though and there is some special OSX magic command to so that which I forget now.
I'd be inclined to keep shouting at the mac until it can dd raspbian onto an SD.
That is the first thing, and the second thing I tried. There is something odd going on, and I'm quite sure it's all about the dd command likely being old, or different somehow. Yes, I will come back to this, but given it took an hour to attempt (which it should not), I punted.
Seems NOOBS left me with Raspian, and it's just a prep package of sorts. Nothing seems broken, apt works, audio, all of it so far. I'll worry when it's time to worry. This was a case of, "I want it ready tonight", so it got there.
I picked up on the shell / serial conflict. That's an old thing, and I disabled that at the initial setup screen on sight. Thanks for the connect tips.
Do I think students could do it? Yes, given the easy path I took.
1. FORMAT SD
2. Get NOOBS
3. Uncompress
4. Copy to SD
5. Power up monitor
6. SD card into Pi
7. Connect keyboard and mouse
8. Power up Pi
9. Wait...
10. Make serial setup choice
11. Follow Propeller IDE instructions.
It did take a while though, and that's just SD throughput. Better cards perform better obviously.
Things to troubleshoot to optimize time:
1. SD card selection. I literally picked one that was cheap, 16Gb, didn't care. Got what I paid for. And I'm reasonably happy. Happy enough. Could be much better.
2. SD card prep. If the students are on windows, or Mac, I would have them use the little programs, just for speed reasons. The Mac, and mine is on a current OS, was slow about that dd copy. Much slower than it needs to be. Get this sorted, or they will be waiting, or better give them a loaded SD card, though I personally would have them do it, just because it's important. They will work from "the origin" open the Pi box, grab all the stuff and do it and get all the boot strapping onto the Pi they need.
Think of this like the difference between giving somebody a computer with an OS on it, and giving them a computer and the OS. It's my opinion, any tech student should load their OS. This is just basic familiarity and literacy.
3. Network. I used a hard line last night, and that was a great experience. Plugged the thing in, it worked, it was fast and flawless. If that isn't done, make sure the Wi-fi instructions are clear. They will have to do some poking around to make that happen. Didn't look hard to me, but I would have that documented explicitly. For me, it was kind of awesome. Just unplug the PS3, plug in the Pi, sit on couch, sip coffee, munch munchies, dork around with the Pi, getting software loaded. Easy peasy.
4. (optional) Keyboard mouse. That Logitech thing is awesome. It's the same keyboard I've used with a few devices, PS3, TV, Windows, Mac, and now Pi. Very highly recommended accessory as it provides trackpad and keyboard. And it appears to just work, no worries, no configurations.
Just for grins, I did some Internet on it last night. For things like YouTube, I can totally see clocking it up from the conservative default. This was borderline useful, and frankly, I think the kids will go for the videos. The default browser works, and it played audio and videos over HDMI with no issues other than the odd pause or two as codecs got going. No real worries here. I'm quite sure a faster SD card would help.
I can totally see how people will connect them to TV's and use them in that way. It was a nice experience. Might have to get another one, do the media center setup on it, and just leave the keyboard / mouse thing laying around for general use.
Forums, and most sites worked out just fine. One can totally use a Pi to investigate further about the Pi.
A quick "sudo apt-get iceweasel" brings a "Firefox" open version to the Pi. I had mixed results with this. If a better browser is needed for some odd reason, that could use some investigation. I don't know what the right answers are, but then again, I think the default browser is serviceable and efficient too.
I'll be connecting a Prop today, and if that goes well, then I would totally use this as a development environment. Lots can be done, and cheap, and at a reasonable speed. And I'm happy to be on an ARM. I've ran every other kind of CPU you can think of, and it's all been a UNIX of some sort. This little computer is just fine.
I would expect many of them to be running in a few hours, if they have all the goodies and a network in front of them. If they have to go poking around and find stuff, a week is a very reasonable expectation. If it were me, I would have a kit ready to go, just waiting for the one who didn't get there. Swap their stuff out, make that work for the next one who doesn't get there, and give them the boost and carry on with the group.
Comments
re:Advanced Options select Serial and disable the shell's use of the serial port.
Yes, I knew I had to do it but doing a search to see how (I think it's because it was assigned to the GPIO pins) I did find a script to do it however, the menu option is much easier thanks!!
@mindrobots
re:Bob, did you add your user to the group that owns the serial ports?
No , not yet, I didn't know about it or even how to do it. I thought that the current owner would have access?
At least the port is opening now and I get " no propeller chip on port '/dev/ttyAMAO' "
I'll try to add the user group
Thanks!
In SimpleIDE I don't see an option for the board in Board type.
re:Default Re: RaspI setup for Prop
Just tried my PPDB with SimpleIDE set to an Activityboard and was able to download my program.
I tried mine and still get : " no propeller chip on port '/dev/ttyAMAO' "
want to just see it work using a USB cable make sure the device setting at the top right of the screen is set to /dev/ttyUSB0 before you load.
Ok that may have been the problem. I'm using a USB cable . I didn't see that option before.
That got it Thanks! for the help. I now have a beautiful blue flashing LED on running on the PPDB with a few lines of Spin code. I wanted to try some C but I'm not feeling well enough tonight to tackle it.
Propeller @ 115200 baud through Propeller port pins using C and Spin.
Start with Raspian, yes?
I won't be able to network mine consistently, until I get a wi-fi solution. Recommendations welcome. Hoping I can get something retail, and I don't care if it's not the cheapest.
It's installing all Raspian now. Had trouble writing the image, so I punted and took the NOOBS path.
For the very short term, I just need the Propeller IDE and info on the serial port found on the Pi. I've a little project to start with that will use a Propeller and serial.
No network isn't going to cut it, due to likely dependencies I see. So, looks like I'll go haul it out to the living room where my one ethernet port lives.
BTW: I tried a cheap-o Logitech keyboard with trackpad combo, and it works great, and it's wireless with one of those little receivers that can present both keyboard and mouse on one USB port. Spiffy!
The MicroSD isn't very fast though. 1.5Mb/s Could be worse... Will be enough, once it's loaded up.
http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/pi-usb-wifi-tests/
Here is the page of my Raspberry Pi 2 review that has my wifi stick tests with it:
http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-2-model-b-review/5/
Running Raspbian is MUCH faster from a USB connected hard drive or SSD:
http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-2-usb-hard-drive-and-adapter-tests/
Hope this helps,
Bill
Welcome to Pi land. Seems like you are going to need to sign up for the rasperry pi forums.
I use a tiny anonymous 10 dollar USB WIFI dongle for networking the Pi. Works a treat.
It's no secret that a huge number of Pi are used as media centres connected to huge TVs. http://kodi.tv/about/
http://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=166
I have a feeling your SD card should be faster than that. An order of magnitude faster.
Any reason to go with just the Raspian image, or just add on to this? Seems clean and simple enough. I'm not too picky.
I guess what I'm really asking is whether or not I'm on some bastardized track with the NOOBS setup. I want the usual apt get and friends to just work. I tried to write the Raspian image from a Mac twice. No go. Something basic wrong there, and I didn't want to track it down.
Yeah, I'll have mine connected to a huge TV for a little while tonight or maybe early in the morning.
I'm off to look for the best way to connect to the PPDB. That's what I need to do, after getting the Prop basics setup. I've an immediate need to work with a Prop, serial comms, and some automation gear sitting on my desk. I'll get the PropGCC and other goodies setup as I move projects off the really old, really cranky, "need to start it with an air can" T60P, running XP! (yeah, I know, but it had a ton of stuff, and well, I just kept it off the net)
Hey, this is a great little computer! It's really nice to be in Linux land. Too bad I can't yet take Sublime with me yet. Tell everybody you know to pester that guy. Maybe he can use the glshim package to bridge the gap between GL and GLes.
At the bog standard, default speeds, I'm largely happy. It's honestly about as quick as my workhorse Linux box was in the mid 00's. And it's tiny and cheaper than the keyboard I bought for that thing long ago, and it's got two more cores! Amazing.
Of course, I did this because I can make a big mistake, blow it up, pull another one outta the box, and go. Nice.
Picked up one of the recommended wifi adapters (not the RPi logo'd one, which is weak) which seems to work quite well.
Only problem is runing speedof.me speed test, I seem to max at about 2Mb.
Woah, just happened to run it on the couch Mac, and my Comcast is showing 96Mb down, 13Mb up. And we have the normal mid-range package...
My older 8GB uSD is also only about 8-10Mb.
I am running the new stripped down Diet-Pi Raspbian image. About 360Mb I believe.
Just trying to find my old OCZ Vertex 2 64GB SSD and a powered USB2 hub. Should help the filesystem keep up with that quad-core.
Looking to make this into a small, 24x7 Master for some remote Adafruit Trinket and MSP430 motes. Was going to use a Prop for that, however this was a faster/lazier way of just getting it going.
Got the software up and the Prop IDE guide is spiffy. Well done.
I'll do Simple IDE and friends shortly. When I get the wi-fi, so I'm not tethered by a cable for it.
Now it's down to connecting up a prop. Tomorrow.
Thanks for the help and chatter. I really had very little trouble. Looks like I will be off line with it, until a WiFi piece shows up. Got enough on there to continue and that was the goal for now.
I kind of want to make a little machine case. Keyboard, smallish display, power, battery, disks.
I read about analog display out being possible. Doing that is on the list as is composite.
No idea about noobs, never seen it. I'd be inclined to keep shouting at the mac until it can dd raspbian onto an SD.
I too have wondered about Sublime. That would be great.
Performance, I geeked out a bit last Saturday (Pi Day) and calculated 50 million digits of Pi on the Pi. That kind of lines up with the world record in 1986 for the number of digits calculated which was 67 million. The record was held by a Hitachi HITAC S-810/20 vector super http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/super/0007.html
Now I've got the equivalent or better on a $35 3-4W credit-card sized computer...
The CRAY-2 held the world record of 29 million decimal places in 1986. We have that handsomely beaten by the Pi.
The next, and last Cray record was 480 million places in 1989. That huge increase was more to do with the clever algorithm developed by the brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky than any speed up in the CRAY.
Now, the Pi won't do 100 million places as it runs out of RAM. But it may be feasible to put some swap space on there and get to there and perhaps even to the 480 million places record.
That would be fitting as I'm using the gmp-chudnovsky code to do this.
That might take a while...
re: Any of you doing WiFi?
Doug,
Yes, I'm using the Canakit Wifi adaptor with Pi2. It's based on the Ralink RT5370 chipset chipset . It works so well I haven't even tried the Ethernet cable yet.
Do you think that anybody could follow the instructions and consistently get the identical, successful result?
If we gave the instructions to a teacher and 28 students, would they all be up and running by the end of the week?
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter - generic plug with an external antenna (cool!) (from Ebay)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter - little generic black plug labeled 802.11n (from Ebay)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter - this one is packaged as a Wi-Pi (cute - from MCM/Element-14)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 7392:7811 Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS] (Official Edimax purchased from Amazon)
Basically two different chipsets in a bunch of different packaging options. I imagine you should be able to find one of these in a dongle from a local source. The package should list the chipset.
That's what is currently on my WiFi network. There's another one out there but he isn't talking today. I guess I need to go troubleshooting.
I would think so. Actually, I would HOPE so. It's pretty simple with the instructions.
I haven't followed the instructions in a long time. I think the Raspberry Pi Foundation has good instructions and I also think Adafruit has good instructions. Those are the ones I remember using. Now, if I'm setting one up and either have a senior moment or hit a snag, I usually go to Raspberrypi.org to refresh my memory or browse the forums.
I think if you give someone a Pi, a keyboard, a monitor and a NOOBS SD card, they should be able to handle it. If it is an ethernet connection then you are done. If it is WiFi, they will of course need SSID and password info.
Edit: I could not promise identical. Once the kids figure out you can change your computer's name through raspi-config, I'm sure any "identical" will go right out the window!
Edit2: I'd make the SD cards for them the first time. As Doug (no, the other Doug) found out, sometimes creating an image can throw a wrench in the works. I spent a considerable amount of time once just to find out that Mac Minis have issues with the Read-Only switch on their SD slots - nobody needs that frustration. No point wasting time with that for the first set-up. That can be a lesson later on in the course once they have had some fun! You want a quick and painless time to first GUI (MPTTFG for you metrics people!)
Edit3: Didn't read your question closely. Raspberry Pi [highlight]for PROP[/highlight], I skipped over the "for PROP". For that, I need to go back and see if I made any notes. If I made notes, there generally was some sort of issue. No notes? No issues! Off the top of my head, I think both SimpleIDE and PropellerIDE installations worked as advertised and instructed.
I did notice that there is some work being done to make available the latest propGCC build, but at this time I would not recommend an attempt to do an install, you have to really be an expert, not a student or a novice.
So, at this point, you could go to the Learn site, do the SimpleIDE 0-9-45 version install and get a feel for the software, and then wait ...
Ray
Format size adjustment turned on. Then I also use http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-operating-systems/win32diskimager
to read and write images. I also use Class 10 SD cards and I see speeds faster than you have posted.
As far as hooking up the Pi to the Propeller I have used a USB cable and I have also used a 3 pin servo cable plugged
into GPIO pins 6, 8, 10 (Grnd, TXD, RXD) for serial comm's. Remember if your going to use the serial port for data transfer you
need to turn off the shell's use of it in the advanced options menu of sudo raspi-config.
That is the first thing, and the second thing I tried. There is something odd going on, and I'm quite sure it's all about the dd command likely being old, or different somehow. Yes, I will come back to this, but given it took an hour to attempt (which it should not), I punted.
Seems NOOBS left me with Raspian, and it's just a prep package of sorts. Nothing seems broken, apt works, audio, all of it so far. I'll worry when it's time to worry. This was a case of, "I want it ready tonight", so it got there.
I picked up on the shell / serial conflict. That's an old thing, and I disabled that at the initial setup screen on sight.
Do I think students could do it? Yes, given the easy path I took.
1. FORMAT SD
2. Get NOOBS
3. Uncompress
4. Copy to SD
5. Power up monitor
6. SD card into Pi
7. Connect keyboard and mouse
8. Power up Pi
9. Wait...
10. Make serial setup choice
11. Follow Propeller IDE instructions.
It did take a while though, and that's just SD throughput. Better cards perform better obviously.
Things to troubleshoot to optimize time:
1. SD card selection. I literally picked one that was cheap, 16Gb, didn't care. Got what I paid for. And I'm reasonably happy. Happy enough. Could be much better.
2. SD card prep. If the students are on windows, or Mac, I would have them use the little programs, just for speed reasons. The Mac, and mine is on a current OS, was slow about that dd copy. Much slower than it needs to be. Get this sorted, or they will be waiting, or better give them a loaded SD card, though I personally would have them do it, just because it's important. They will work from "the origin" open the Pi box, grab all the stuff and do it and get all the boot strapping onto the Pi they need.
Think of this like the difference between giving somebody a computer with an OS on it, and giving them a computer and the OS. It's my opinion, any tech student should load their OS. This is just basic familiarity and literacy.
3. Network. I used a hard line last night, and that was a great experience. Plugged the thing in, it worked, it was fast and flawless. If that isn't done, make sure the Wi-fi instructions are clear. They will have to do some poking around to make that happen. Didn't look hard to me, but I would have that documented explicitly. For me, it was kind of awesome. Just unplug the PS3, plug in the Pi, sit on couch, sip coffee, munch munchies, dork around with the Pi, getting software loaded. Easy peasy.
4. (optional) Keyboard mouse. That Logitech thing is awesome. It's the same keyboard I've used with a few devices, PS3, TV, Windows, Mac, and now Pi. Very highly recommended accessory as it provides trackpad and keyboard. And it appears to just work, no worries, no configurations.
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/wireless-touch-keyboard-k400r
Just for grins, I did some Internet on it last night. For things like YouTube, I can totally see clocking it up from the conservative default. This was borderline useful, and frankly, I think the kids will go for the videos. The default browser works, and it played audio and videos over HDMI with no issues other than the odd pause or two as codecs got going. No real worries here. I'm quite sure a faster SD card would help.
I can totally see how people will connect them to TV's and use them in that way. It was a nice experience. Might have to get another one, do the media center setup on it, and just leave the keyboard / mouse thing laying around for general use.
Forums, and most sites worked out just fine. One can totally use a Pi to investigate further about the Pi.
A quick "sudo apt-get iceweasel" brings a "Firefox" open version to the Pi. I had mixed results with this. If a better browser is needed for some odd reason, that could use some investigation. I don't know what the right answers are, but then again, I think the default browser is serviceable and efficient too.
I'll be connecting a Prop today, and if that goes well, then I would totally use this as a development environment. Lots can be done, and cheap, and at a reasonable speed. And I'm happy to be on an ARM. I've ran every other kind of CPU you can think of, and it's all been a UNIX of some sort. This little computer is just fine.
I would expect many of them to be running in a few hours, if they have all the goodies and a network in front of them. If they have to go poking around and find stuff, a week is a very reasonable expectation. If it were me, I would have a kit ready to go, just waiting for the one who didn't get there. Swap their stuff out, make that work for the next one who doesn't get there, and give them the boost and carry on with the group.
(off to send a nag mail to the author, and you should too)