Adaptive approach towards Project Management

In today's fast-paced Business, Project Manager's play a pivotal role in the success and failure of projects. Theoretically Project Management encompasses multiple modules like Planning, Scheduling, Cost Management, Resource Management (and more..) and also involves various artifacts like Project Charter, Risk Register, Status Reports, etc. However when you talk of Project Management in IT, not all projects are of the same magnitude and complexity, and hence one needs to have an adaptive approach towards Project Management to fine tune the amount of efforts an assigned Project Manager / Delivery Project Manager spends in a project. 

In today's projectized world working on a Global Delivery Model, you will generally find one or many of the following Project Mgmt related roles depending on the size of the projects -

1. Program Director.

2. Program Manager.

3. Lead Project Manager.

4. Regional Project Manager.

5. Project Coordinator.

6. Service Transition Manager.

Best Out of Waste - Legacy Peripherals as Raspberry Pi / Kodi Media Centre Remotes

I am pretty sure that at some point in time you feel like throwing off your old Keyboards, Mouse and other legacy Peripherals. But if you have just bought a Raspberry Pi like me, think again! 

Your legacy input devices may turn out to be some useful remotes for Raspberry Pi Media Centre.

There are multiple tools through which you can have a Media Centre running on a Raspberry Pi - you have OSMC, OpenElec and LibreElec. While they all sound different, they eventually turn out to be Operating Systems to run the main Media Centre Application named KODI (earlier known as "XBMC").

OSMC and LibreElec are offered as part of the NOOBS menu(multi-boot OS loader for Raspberry Pi). I tried out both OSMC and LibreElec but finally settled with LibreElec as I found it to more lightweight and fast as compared to OSMC.

While you can use a USB Keyboard and Mouse (or a Wireless USB Keyboard and Mouse) to do the main LibreElec setup, but once all's done, you will no more require a Keyboard to operate it. In this post I share with you my experience about re-purposing legacy peripherals as remotes to operate the Media Centre.

Selecting the right Case, Power Adapter and GPIO Cable for Raspberry Pi 3

While my last post on Raspberry Pi 3 was mainly aimed towards making a custom-made Case to begin your initial Pi 3 setup, in this post I would share my experience on selecting the right Case, Charger and GPIO Cable for the Pi.

1. Case - 

Pi 3 being a niche product, its difficult to find a case in a nearby Electronic store and hence you are left to choose only from the e-commerce portals like eBay, Snapdeal, FlipKart, etc. Though there are numerous options available online, you need to concentrate on some key features before you order the case -

• Availability of a Cooling Fan and Heat Sink -  While many in the forums would say that you neither need a fan or heat sink, but after having experimented with the Pi 3 for nearly a week now I would say that it is always recommended to have both to keep the Pi 3 running cool. I found the idle temperatures of the Pi 3 without fan + heat-sink in Indian conditions to over around 45 - 50 deg C. Post using fan + heat-sink, the idle temperatures are found around 38 - 42 deg C. I would say that the fan + heat-sink cools the Pi 3 by almost 10 deg C
• Access to GPIO Pins - As you know that the Pi 3 is not just meant for Server-based computing but also for Robotics and other Engineering projects, hence a case which provides easy access to the GPIO pins without compromising the protection of the Pi 3 board is required
• (Optional) Access to the On-board Camera Port - Similar to the GPIO pins, a case with easy access to the Camera Port is preferable. But this is only required if you plan to buy a Camera manufactured for Pi
• Easy mounting case - A case where the Pi 3 board can fit with minimal screws

After keeping in mind all the above key features I went for the Case shown above bought from Amazon.

DIY: Initial Raspberry Pi 3 experience & Making a low-cost Pi Case with 250gm Butter Case

New year brought some good news for me after I finally bought a Raspberry Pi 3 to build some hobby projects (Server based and Engineering) which I had read on the Net from long. After ordering the Pi 3 I was also prompted to buy a Case with a fan since some articles and videos showed that the CPU of Pi really gets hot sometimes. 

Within a short span of 24 hours I roughly completed 3-4 projects - 

1. Using the Pi as a Portable NAS (Network Attached Storage) Server.

2. Using the Pi as Webcam Server using a legacy Desktop Webcam.

3. Connecting the Pi to Internet using a TATA Photon Plus Internet dongle.

4. Booting the Pi using a small-sized Micro SD card and a large USB Thumb Drive.

I also managed to play streaming using (using Gaana.com) and also watched HD videos on YouTube. Do note that by default the Pi neither plays Music using the Analog Audio Port, nor through HDMI. So you need to run the "raspi-config" utility (Advanced Options -> Audio) to fine tune your Pi. I also learnt that the Pi doesn't have any BIOS and hence its start-up is controlled using the "/boot/config.txt" file.