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Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#81

Post by ern »

etherealG wrote: post #36
hexleo wrote: post #32

I'm interested in Raspberry Pi. I bought one before. It's just a small PC, use one hand you can hold it. But when you want to Raspberry to do some complex works, it let you down. I want to know where does Raspberry Pi can work well?

The Pi makes a fantastic media center when combined with XBMC.

"Fantastic" may be overstating it. I've been running Raspbmc for about 15 months now, and although the video rendering is very good, the XMBC UI is a bit laggy and unresponsive (although there seems to have been an improvement recently). I've also used it as an SFTP client and to run a few light cron jobs (rock solid there).

Given the price, I am pleased with it, but I wouldn't recommend it as a media center for the non-tech savvy.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#82

Post by SuddsMcDuff »

makomk wrote: post #52
praeivis wrote: post #28

I got surprised B+ cost same as B, and they even keep B in production. That, what I miss from other manufacturers in modern world.

They'd probably piss off a lot of their developer community if they didn't keep the B in production. There's a huge number of third-party cases and projects that are built around the original connector arrangement.

http://www.kano.me/ is a prime example of this. It would have been the worst possible timing for them if the model B was discontinued.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#83

Post by makomk »

userbinator wrote: post #72
Nux wrote: post #40

Oh man, I was really hoping for a better CPU. The current one is just so dang slow.

Slow and proprietary, which is not a great combination... there's a lot of interesting new ARM SoCs from China that are coming out, like the Allwinner A3x series (quad A7s, >1GHz). It would be pretty unlikely for one of those to show up in the next Pi though; if anything, it'll probably be another Broadcom.

Yeah, which is a shame because I think an Allwinner SoC or similar would also fix the other problems people are complaining about in the discussion, like the slow/unreliable USB and Ethernet and the lack of line-in. (Allwinner SoCs have proper USB and Ethernet controllers and audio DAC/ADCs onboard.)

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#84

Post by joelhaasnoot »

makomk wrote: post #83
userbinator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and proprietary, which is not a great combination... there's a lot of interesting new ARM SoCs from China that are coming out, like the Allwinner A3x series (quad A7s, >1GHz). It would be pretty unlikely for one of those to show up in the next Pi though; if anything, it'll probably be another Broadcom.

Yeah, which is a shame because I think an Allwinner SoC or similar would also fix the other problems people are complaining about in the discussion, like the slow/unreliable USB and Ethernet and the lack of line-in. (Allwinner SoCs have proper USB and Ethernet controllers and audio DAC/ADCs onboard.)

Some of the Android "HDMI stick" devices I've seen running Allwinner SoCs aren't very fast either. Granted they're faster, but compared to SoCs in cell phones, they're dog slow. The Android builds also always seem to not work in one way or other.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#85

Post by WatchDog »

goldenkey wrote: post #75
userbinator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and proprietary, which is not a great combination... there's a lot of interesting new ARM SoCs from China that are coming out, like the Allwinner A3x series (quad A7s, >1GHz). It would be pretty unlikely for one of those to show up in the next Pi though; if anything, it'll probably be another Broadcom.

Ebon Upton [0], one of the main folk from the Raspberry Pi foundation works for Broadcom and does SoC. So odds are slim considering that connection probably enabled them to get extreme price arrangements otherwise not doable. [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

His Broadcom relationship is probably much less relevant now that the foundation has some money in the bank and a product that has achieved wide spread success.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#86

Post by userbinator »

pja wrote: post #66
xorcist wrote: post #21

The Pi would be infititely more useful to me if the ethernet interface was attached to a "real" bus and not hung on USB. Here's to hoping that will be the next upgrade!

Which bus exactly? Reading the BCM2835 datasheet ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM283... ) the chip has a couple of UARTS, 2 SPI interfaces and a USB interface. The only interface that can do DMA is the USB one. All the others have relatively small FIFO buffers and require the CPU to do all the I/O work. So you could attach an ethernet interface to one of the SPI buses, or bit bang a few GPI…

The internal bus - AMBA/AXI/etc., so it's basically another peripheral block the CPU can access directly.

(That datasheet is also very incomplete - there's lots of other interesting stuff in the SoC like the MIPI CSI/DSI interface, and if you felt perverse enough and had the right skillset you might be able to get Ethernet-like data transfer out of one of those...)

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#87

Post by invmatt »

ern wrote: post #81
etherealG wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi makes a fantastic media center when combined with XBMC.

"Fantastic" may be overstating it. I've been running Raspbmc for about 15 months now, and although the video rendering is very good, the XMBC UI is a bit laggy and unresponsive (although there seems to have been an improvement recently). I've also used it as an SFTP client and to run a few light cron jobs (rock solid there). Given the price, I am pleased with it, but I wouldn't recommend it as a media center for the…

If you're willing to spend quite a bit of time configuring XBMC it runs smoothly. I use openelec with the theme 'bello', any animation heavy themes will kill it straight away.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#88

Post by pjc50 »

copperx wrote: post #35

I still can't see why would anyone buy one except as one of those toys that you buy and then gets tossed in the closet. 10 years ago I could see the appeal, but now? The robotics, home automation, and weekend project use cases seem like would be better served by a $5 microcontroller. Some projects, such as the weather station, justify the use of a full-fledged OS, but with the cost of buying an existing, proven, weat…

The use case of the Pi is a computer that can be given to small children to be theirs, to be a counterpart to the BBC Micro of thirty years ago.

It's also an attempt to get right what the OLPC people got wrong (too expensive, too different from all other systems).

It has to have a decent display, which really rules out microcontrollers (an early prototype was indeed an AVR that ran Lua and output composite video). It has to be cheap, and indeed it is cheaper than all the other full-fledged Linux boards with larger processors and more RAM.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#90

Post by pjc50 »

jokoon wrote: post #68

I wonder how well it can emulate PSX games... I guess it would not do well because there's no 3D acceleration...

It has extremely good 3D acceleration, provided you're not unreasonably upset by using binary drivers. You can now get fairly good results with the open source ones too (30fps Quake3).
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