Raspberry Pi and LabJack U6

Hi

So in an effort to keep motivated on this little side project, I’m working on a raspberry pi + labjack U6 combo.    It’s only kind of a side project, because my group needs this to work before our yearly summer program in Greenbank, WV at ERIRA.  (See http://skynet.unc.edu/erira for more info)

I’ve got the pi set up and installed, I definitely mistakenly left it in GB layout for the keyboard… so despite both being english my symbols were quite messed up. : )  Luckily it’s pretty simple to go in and change it after the fact.

So tales my adventures with these two pieces of technology.  Both are incredibly cool, and the pi is stupid affordable.  I very much enjoyed hooking it up to my 24″ monitor with HDMI.

I purchased a Raspberry Pi Model B ($35) from Newark.  I also got a power cable, an SD card (too lazy to just buy one and install it…), and I bought a mini keyboard.  You’d also need a regular HDMI cable if you don’t have one laying around the house like I did.  I got a case too, but I am really only using about 1/2 of that right now, just so the Pi isn’t sitting on bare on the desk.

As for the LabJack, I’ve got a U6, and that’s relevant information for when you try to install access this thing after installation. (:

I followed these directions:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ sudo apt-get install git-core
$ git clone git://github.com/labjack/exodriver.git
$ cd exodriver/liblabjackusb/
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..
$ sudo cp 10-labjack.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/.
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
$ cd
$ git clone git://github.com/labjack/LabJackPython.git
$ cd LabJackPython/
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ python
>>> import u3
>>> d = u3.U3()
>>> d.configU3()

However, the interesting problem I was getting was that it kept saying “can’t find the device.” Even though I’d unplugged/replugged the U6 and saw it as properly being seen with the command

lsusb

And I saw “LabJack U6” — it wasn’t for longer than I’d like to admit before I finally realized I was being an idiot.  I’m not using an u3, so naturally I shouldn’t be creating u3 objects. (:  After that, everything worked great!

More to come…