Weeks Four and Five with Prisma

My fourth week at Prisma started with loading pallets full of older computers, monitors, and printers to get them ready to be scrapped.

After spending my first day of week four at Prisma loading these pallets my task shifted to Raspberry Pi's. Raspberry Pi's are small computers that can plug into computer monitors, tvs, or video screens made for the Pi's. These devices have USB ports just like a computer as well as ethernet ports for internet.

At Prisma, Raspberry Pi's are used for various tasks such as displaying and tracking orders that are being moved along the creation and shipping process.

Another use is for scanning in orders as they are brought into the printing areas.

Raspberry Pi's are also used as display screens outside of the meeting rooms at Prisma; showing times when the meeting room is reserved, showing the current time, and even displaying the weather. This is done by using a website called DAKboard.

When I started week five I was given the task of setting up the new Raspberry Pi's we had ordered; this involves installing Raspbian on each of the Raspberry Pi's, creating an autostart program that loads up Chromium, and editing the autostart file in the Raspberry Pi's to remove the mouse cursor, start Chromium in full screen, and prevent the screen from timing out.

Raspbian is the operating system we use for the Raspberry Pi's and it is a Debian-based operating system which is a form of Linux a open source operating system. Chromium is Google's open source web browser that is used on the Pi's and autostart runs commands when the Raspberry Pi is turned on and loading the Operating System. I am almost finished setting up the remaining Pi's and the last step is setting them up at their respective stations.