I am using two of those two million RPis with camera modules to record pollinators visiting flowers (backpackable; activated by motion; solar powered). I'm still ironing out some kinks with the software, but the quality of footage produce by the camera module, the low power requirements and the flexibility you get with the RPi are really pretty amazing considering the price.
Two million Raspberry Pi sold
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#52Would 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.
Especially with an encrypted disk.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out the new and old cubieboard. Cheap, dual core, SATA.
I have a Cubieboard, very happy with it. A new Cubieboard2 is on order. The 4 core A20 is pin for pin with the A10. Not to be off topic, I have three Pi-B's doing local file storage, media center and on a robot platform. The ecosystem around the Pi is one of the best. A quick search will find someone doing something like your idea.
This thing will decode 4k video?
http://www.romaco.ca/blog/2013/07/05/the-cubieboard2-the-mos...
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
More cores, mostly. I tried using the Raspberry Pi with server software such as Owncloud or calendarserver. It just barely works, but it is still very slow. Like, response times upwards of four seconds. Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
There are quite a few quad-core, single-board, fanless ARM computers: utilite, wandboard, odroid, udoo, radxa. I have two odroid U2 that I use for testing distributed and multithreaded code. One odroid core (exynos 4412 @1.7GHz ) is more than 8x as fast as the pi, for some numerical simulation code (ODEs). Storage is eMMC, so should be faster than the class 10 SD card in a Pi. It was very easy to get Linaro set up on…
These sites track new board and mini-pc releases:
http://linuxgizmos.com http://www.cnx-software.com http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc http://www.fanlesstech.com
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#55I'd like to hear a little about the educational successes that RPi may have achieved since launch. That was the goal, right?
My university sent out all the new computer science undergraduates a RPi each and held two challenges at the start of term, here's a video of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgjbiBG2sf8 .
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
More cores, mostly. I tried using the Raspberry Pi with server software such as Owncloud or calendarserver. It just barely works, but it is still very slow. Like, response times upwards of four seconds. Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
Yeah, I could see why dropping that stuff on it would pretty much swamp it. Of course your running a giant PHP infrastructure [1] there which was built the way it was in part because memory and cpu cycles were "free."
What I'm saying is that you could implement the equivalent of OwnCloud and CalendarServer on the Pi knowing that it needed to be memory and CPU efficient, and no doubt get 300 - 500mS responses. But that would mean not using frameworks that start by assuming you have at least 1GB of memory free and can run an interpreter (PHP) on an interpreter (JS) on the actual code.
Looking at the code for these I think the biggest issue is memory for them. A 2G Pi would probably do what you needed, trying to swap on the Pi (especially if you do that to an SD card) makes it really really slow. Its better if you can swap to an NFS mounted file system, and even cooler if you can swap to a custom memory instance in another server :-)
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
More cores, mostly. I tried using the Raspberry Pi with server software such as Owncloud or calendarserver. It just barely works, but it is still very slow. Like, response times upwards of four seconds. Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
Its not really that slow; try different software. Low power means you need to be slightly efficient.
Well, for today's software, it kind of is slow. Its IPC performance is about 1 DMIPS/Mhz vs ~3.5 for the latest high-end ARM chips, which also have 3x the clock speed of RPi, and come in quad-core variety. Do the math. That's a 10x-40x delta. Of course such a board wouldn't cost $30 anymore, but they could still improve performance by at least 3x with another low-end, but more modern, CPU, even as single core, but even more as dual-core or quad-core. Even a single core Cortex A7 at 1.2 Ghz would be about 3x faster than Raspberry Pi (90 percent faster IPC * 70 percent faster clock speed).
Personally, I think they should wait until they can make a dual-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 with 1 GB of RAM for $25, which may be possible by 2015, and maybe a quad-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 one with 2 GB of RAM (and perhaps a few extra stuff), for under $50 (I would make it for $40-$45 so the total cost with shipping and whatnot still remains under $50 for most people, instead of going over that price point). A single core Cortex A53 at 1.5 Ghz (its stock clock speed) would be ~5x faster, and also 64-bit. By the way, Cortex A7 and Cortex A53 are both the true successors of the ARM11 CPU RPi is using, and they serve the same markets.
The $25-$50 market, is still probably their best market, since a lot more companies compete at the $100-$200 level.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting - I've been thinking about doing this for a while. So I take it from the atlas page that you are running a standard (non-exit) relay?
Yes. As you can see my first relay started out as an exit relay, but my fascist ISP (whom I can not choose or contact) kept on blocking my router's mac address, which made my relay unstable. Since I am not an exit anymore the relay has been running fine.
You can't contact your ISP? Will they contact you if you stop paying?
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#59I got a Pi and a case and connected it via a USB-to-MIDI cable to my electronic piano, and now I can play and record performances to midi files on the Pi. Really cool. It basically gave my piano a technology update so I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars for one of those newer keyboards with a USB port.
My next mini-project is to build a web app that can run these midi tools and list the performances in a nice UI, so that I can control the piano with a tablet or phone on the wifi network (using something other than an SSH terminal).
I am thinking of getting a couple of other Pi's for webcam use. I had one hooked up to a cam but it kept dying for some reason. Maybe because of the cheap wifi dongle.
It's an amazing little gadget and the sky's the limit on what you can do with it.
Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold
#60Who 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…
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