Fixing the Raspberry Pi mouse lag

This was one of the most irritating things about the Raspberry Pi when I first got it. Supposedly it is a pretty fast little machine, but if you start up in X, you’ll notice a distinctive lag in the mouse movement. When I saw that I thought: “Maybe these people were lying about how fast this computer is?”

Well the good news it that it isn’t because the processor is slow. It’s actually a setting on the Pi making it lag, probably to increase processing performance when in X. But here’s how to fix it.

First make sure all of the software is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get install update
sudo apt-get install dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

Next you’ll want to edit the file -> /boot/cmdline.txt

sudo vim /boot/cmdline.txt

Add: “usbhid.mousepoll=0” to the end of the line. (No quotes)

Then do a reboot again and it should fix the problem!

New adventure, the Raspberry Pi

Over this summer we had a workshop at my school where we started learning about these amazing little computers, the Raspberry Pi. For our workshop we used the Pi 2.

The Raspberry Pi 2 has a 900MHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, HDMI output, 4 USBs and Ethernet ports. For a computer this fast it is remarkably affordable as well. The kit that I bought came with a black case, power cord, SD card with the everything on it to install the operating system, HDMI cable, Wifi adapter, heat sink, and many different accessories for the GPIO pins. The kit costs $85, but the actual Raspberry Pi 2 costs only $35.

One of the surprising things about the Pi is how many things you can do with it. The Pi itself is like any computer running Linux, so starting it up with the desktop view (called “X”) it has Libre Office, a web browser and several other programs installed. It can also be used as a music host in your home, a web server for your website (it’s low power consumption makes it great for a simple personal website), a great tool for learning more about circuits and programming, using it as a web cam with the purchase of a PiCam and many more uses that I can’t even begin to explain.

But for my purposes, the Raspberry Pi 2 is one of my next steps toward learning more about computer hardware and software implementation. In my coming posts I’ll be writing more about my experimantation with the Raspberry Pi. This summer is going to be fun!