A new project - XBMC and GPIO

One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is that the OS is on an SD card, so if you want to play around with another distro you can simply get another card, burn an image and away you go.

So last night I removed the existing distro and installed XBMC so that I could try and play a specific video file (a blu-ray DVD rip).

Th install was quick and faultless (ever heard a M$ user say that ?) and in half an hour the video was playing.

I'm now thinking that the Pi shutdown needs a bit of tweaking so I'm going to start looking into making a hardware power controller. What I want is a single button that starts and stops the Pi; first thoughts are a relay that, once activated, holds itself on and a shutdown script that uses a GPIO pin to release the relay (might need two relays, not drawn the circuit yet).

Got a busy weekend but will press on in any spare moments.