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Ten million Raspberry Pis

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#31

Post by privong »

yardie wrote: post #13
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I have an original Pi 1. When I first got it it was also collecting dust. Now it's on our boat, monitoring power, watching the bilge pumps, and uploading AIS traffic to marine traffic and aishub. And when sailing it pumps out instrument data to a smartwatch. What it does is up to you, you are only limited by your imagination.

Any chance you have a writeup or blog post about the boat system? I'd be interested to read about the setup.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#32

Post by creshal »

nikon wrote: post #24

I found quite a good use for mine. I'm sure I could achieve it with something like DD-WRT, but it was fun: Installed Debian on a Pi 3 Model B. Put the device in a case[0]. Installed dnsmasq[1] to manage local DHCP/DNS. Forwards to Google DNS. Also have everything running on a local search domain, along with some reservations. Installed OpenVPN along with a dynamic DNS daemon[2] so I can VPN into my home network from…

Definitely works with DD/OpenWRT, but many routers won't have enough free storage/RAM/clock cycles for it. RasPis are sillily powerful compared to that.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#33

Post by clappski »

wepple wrote: post #27
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I've recently dusted off my original RPi that'd been collecting dust, installed the lite[1] non-X raspbian distro, and plan to see how long I can survive with it as my sole desktop at home, using my phone when I desperately need to check in with peoples cat and breakfast photos. [1] I remember when 'lite' was 1.44mb, not 2.5gb

It does come with thousands of packages still installed. Check out the Arch distro, that should be much smaller.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#34

Post by pjc50 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #30
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still twisting words. There's nothing "premium" here, it's just a kit. People should spend 50 bucks on a 2nd hand Core2Duo ThinkPad and some mcu for GPIO, they'll learn as much for less.

I agree. The eBay hand-me-down market is strong for high-performance gear in this range. I've also seen FPGA kits and SGI Altix servers at similar price. Nothing wrong with new products at various price points but lets not kid ourselves on their relative value.

I think people are too keen to dismiss the Pi's hardware without realising that that's not where the Pi foundation puts most of its efforts and staff: it's the educational materials that are the focus and the hardware is a means to deliver them.

In other words, if you can make use of an FPGA or an SGI you're not the primary target market. Even if more Pi have gone to hobbyists than children, the children are still the primary target market. It's an attempt to make educational technology that kids actually like.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#35

Post by creshal »

wepple wrote: post #27
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I've recently dusted off my original RPi that'd been collecting dust, installed the lite[1] non-X raspbian distro, and plan to see how long I can survive with it as my sole desktop at home, using my phone when I desperately need to check in with peoples cat and breakfast photos. [1] I remember when 'lite' was 1.44mb, not 2.5gb

Even without X, Raspbian ships the whole debian package development stack by default. That's over a hundred megabytes for GCC and co. – which makes sense for its intended role as teaching device.

Edit: Also, it ships with 100+ MiB worth of kernel drivers.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#36

Post by heywire »

jacquesm wrote: post #5
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I wonder how many of them are quietly doing a whole pile of work. Even if only 10% of them is in use (which would be a very very low estimate) then this amounts to an incredible success because you can afford to buy one, try something and forget about it without breaking the bank. The raspberry pi is a game-changer because it gives you a full fledged computer for a very low amount of money, so low you can actually af…

I have a few of them in our house, and like you said, they're just quietly working away. A couple of them are serving as motion-sensing security cameras, complete with email alerts. I just commented yesterday actually to someone about how I've not had to do a thing to them in well over a year. Their uptime might be over 2 years had I attached a battery backup to them.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#37

Post by ensignavenger »

yardie wrote: post #13
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I have an original Pi 1. When I first got it it was also collecting dust. Now it's on our boat, monitoring power, watching the bilge pumps, and uploading AIS traffic to marine traffic and aishub. And when sailing it pumps out instrument data to a smartwatch. What it does is up to you, you are only limited by your imagination.

I recently acquired an old sailboat and have a couple of 1st gen Pis looking for a job- would be very interested in reading more about your system!

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#38

Post by irascible »

creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I've got about 5. 3 of em see daily use as media server, 3d print server, and mame rig.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#39

Post by thebakeshow »

pipio21 wrote: post #21
creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

That was my fear before buying it. Now I have 10 or so. I use them more or less this way: -One for the TV, it lets me watch things that the smart TV can't. -Three controlling my 3d printers with octoprint. -Two on each car for recording video with cameras and GPS info. -Three or so for controlling DSLR cameras and motors for panoramas, 3D scanning and so on. They are extremely convenient for making things for other p…

Do you have any writeups on the last 2 items? They both interest me.

Re: Ten million Raspberry Pis

#40

Post by AstroJetson »

creshal wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of them are just collecting dust in peoples' desk drawers. We ordered two of the original ones for our office to play around with them, but only now, after 4½ years, I finally managed to find use for one as music player, after I decided I was too lazy to plug/unplug the speakers from my laptop.

I've purchased a number of Pi's across the years. In most cases they have been used for projects or given to people that have a need for them. But in full disclosure, there are three Zeros and three Pi-3's waiting for their turn on the bench. Oh and a hoard of 64Gb SD cards from a really amazing after Christmas sale.

In my lab there are five of them that do a variety of tasks from adblock, media servers, file servers (and it's sister that does the offsite backups at a friends), ham radio stuff, etc.

I'm pretty excited about the new Pi Bakery software http://www.pibakery.org/ that makes it easy peasy to spin new ones up.

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