Great little boards, I use these as mini portable file servers/Git hosts in my lab.
Two million Raspberry Pi sold
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#22I would love to get a Raspberry Pi but I don't know what I would like to do with it. Suggestions?
Here's what I use mine for:
> Hosting my website (with CloudFlare in front)
> A gateway into my network (almost all ports are open to the RPi including SSH). I can ssh in and then every device on my network is configured to accept connections from it. Hitting my devices directly (over v6, for instance) would be rejected by firewalls and such.
> Personal Cloud: I use BitTorrent sync to move files around my computers. Sometimes my desktop / laptop aren't on at the same time. I solved this problem by putting BTSync on my RPi. It's online 24/7 so my files are always accessible.
> MySQL server (for development).
Ideas I have floating around:
> Possibly hosting my email
> Internal services like Squid caching.
> Server-Side Development. It's a tight environment (ram is limited, cpu is fairly slow) so it forces you to build lightweight programs. If it can run well on a RPi, it's probably fine on a VPS.
> Monitoring/graphing uptime/latency -- My router doesn't do this for me.
> Scheduling backups (possibly via rsync?)
Your RPi is basically a home server. Use it to control devices in your house and do automation.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#23Who is buying these? 2 Million is way above hobbiest usage.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#24I would love to get a Raspberry Pi but I don't know what I would like to do with it. Suggestions?
I've been following Pi folks since it came out and there are a range of people from those who pre-ordered to those who got one only as the result of a gift.
Pi's are good for teaching you things, so if you got one you would learn with it. A number of folks have started learning about Linux system administration with theirs after being somewhat 'light weight' in that department. Others are learning about new programming languages or environments, from node.js, to R, to Scratch, to python. Getting Docker on them has had people setting up server deploys. Running web servers have people creating small web sites with bootstrap and other technologies.
But if you really aren't interested in learning those sorts of things, well its not really very useful. Everything it does can be done 'better' in a production environment by a server, usually x86 based, designed to do what ever it is it is doing.
Bottom line is there are a lot of things an RPi can help you learn by giving you hands on experience. If you're not interested in learning those things, it probably isn't all that useful.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#25Would I notice any performance gain from using a cheap pc over a pi for something like BT sync? The Pi's processor is equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium 2, and that's kinds scary.
Certainly. The RPI is not able to even remotely saturate its network card + a USB harddrive.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#26Who is buying these? 2 Million is way above hobbiest usage.
Actually not above 'hobbiest' usage. Its comparable to sales of other comparable things like Arduinos which have sold north of 2M units at this point if you count all the variations.
That said, like the Arduino, there are a small mix of custom-commercial uses in there, some educational where the units are purchased as part of a curriculum, and of course some 'novelty' purchases where people think "I should get one of these" and then never use it again.
So it has good penetration in the hobbiest market which, depending on who you believe is 3 to 5 million 'seats'.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#27What's the plan for future devices? It would be great if some low cost device like this would have a 12-18 month upgrade cycle and create the sort of buzz as an Apple or Samsung device. Moore's law has benefits at $30 too. Maybe release a $99 version every year then make last year's model available at $35. Get Intel involved? They're really working hard to get into low-power devices.
Yes! I am waiting desperately for a Raspberry Pi with an updated CPU!
Check out the new and old cubieboard. Cheap, dual core, SATA.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#28What's the plan for future devices? It would be great if some low cost device like this would have a 12-18 month upgrade cycle and create the sort of buzz as an Apple or Samsung device. Moore's law has benefits at $30 too. Maybe release a $99 version every year then make last year's model available at $35. Get Intel involved? They're really working hard to get into low-power devices.
Yes! I am waiting desperately for a Raspberry Pi with an updated CPU!
What about the CPU are you waiting for? Higher performance? 64 bit vs 32 bit? And what is the application that is made possible by that you can't do now?
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#29I wonder when they plan to make one based on Cortex A53/ARMv8. I assume sometime in 2015, to get it a little cheaper?
The Pi already has a trailing-edge ARMv6 SoC for cost reasons. They'll probably be reluctant to move until the fab line used to make the current chip shuts down.
And Arduino is still very popular with a much simpler chip.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#30I wonder when they plan to make one based on Cortex A53/ARMv8. I assume sometime in 2015, to get it a little cheaper?
Dude, the current Raspberry Pis aren't even based on ARMv7.