Raspberry Pi setup

[Iain.Faulkner]

Morning all,

 

We've just been asked to look at setting up a class set of Raspberry Pi's and I'm wondering how best to do this.

 

I think in an ideal world we would have a room with monitors, keyboards & mice where the Pi's lived permanently, but sadly that isn't an option as we don't have the room availability. The Head of Computing would like them put onto the school wireless and then have students access them remotely via a remote console, but I'm worried about what other access this would give students.

 

How have others gone about providing access to their Raspberry Pi's?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Iain

Edited April 28, 2017 by Iain.Faulkner

[FN-GM]

Not using them in our schools, but could you use a cheap KVM and use them with the existing computers?

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Electronics-Photo/Ugreen-Switch-Monitor-Keyboard-Control/B01D5XVO62/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1493366915&sr=8-3&keywords=kvm

[pcstru]

How? Persuaded them that by the time they have sorted monitors, keyboards and mice, the saving over a cheap PC is actually not good value especially when considering the support overheads of an additional platform to learn, configure, secure and manage. Unless they are doing stuff with GPIO pins, a linux VM is likely to be a better solution (but ultimately it does depend exactly what they intend to do).

 

If the requirement is to accessing them over a remote console (so no physical access to GPIO), a PI like VM might just be suitable as a real PI.

[Danp]

We have a PiNET wifi network that the Pis connect to, they have fixed IPs and then VNC or SSH into them via their desktop machines. This works for what our groups are doing.

[Bev]

We have a spare set of monitors/keyboards/mice in one school I work in. I like this setup as the kids really grasp that this little device is the actual computer.

 

in the other school we use the second monitor port and have a HDMI cable available for the Pi's to use (main PC using VGA), and we just unplug the mouse and keyboard and attach to the pi.

 

We used them remotely with VNC and it worked ok but there was a lag for things like Minecraft which we used a lot.

[skell]

Also for updating, you should consider making a local mirror and pointing the Pis there.

[mdrabble]

We have USB KVM switches with power for the PI provided by the USB3 socket from the PC.

 

Seems to work well..... student have to collect the PI from the member of staff and then plug them in.

 

I don't allow them on the network at the moment - once I have vlans setup correctly I may set them up on a dedicated SSID and a filter connection with exceptions in place for the Pi updates. If they need internet access then they can log in using the Smoothwall portal.