Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually there will be a Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi. Let's hope it handles tail recursion.
Raspberry Tau?
This tickled my cleverness center.
Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
161–170 of 223 posts
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#162The 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!
I agree and it isn't just the RPi that is like this... it's every board based on an ARM SoC that was designed for a mobile device like a smart phone.
Switching to another (faster) bus won't necessarily improve anything. You have CPU overhead to contend with, as well as relatively slow I/O on the SD card. So, just because the port is moved to a faster bus and could support GbE, doesn't mean you would get GbE performance.
Your home network is likely already faster than the Pi can handle, let alone your internet speed. A file transfer across your network (scp a video to the SD cart for example) will already burst, then slow down as-is. You can see, the SD cart write i/o is the current bottleneck.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#163For people saying they want a faster revision - do remember there are other computers in this form factor. I recently got an Odroid U3 and am very happy with it. Of course, it's $65, not $35. I tried setting up owncloud, nginx, a web server, etc. on a Pi and it couldn't handle it (everything ran, but terribly), the Odroid does well. I still like the Pi, though. There are some people for whom saving $30 really does ma…
The Rpi is now a totally open source platform though, unlike the Odroid. Same for the Novena laptop.
Also, I've heard bad things about the Odroid's stability under load. Do you have any problems? I've also definitely had problems with the Rpi under load, but I expect the new switching power supply to solve that.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#164A dedicated digital audio jack would be a useful addition, it could even take the place of the useless composite video RCA, so the port arrangement of the Model B would be kept.
With a digital audio jack a pi could be a decent hifi music streamer, better and cheaper than the AirPort Express. Now you need a $30-50 splitter (or the hifiberry add on) to get the audio off the hdmi, which makes the total cost more than double.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#165For people saying they want a faster revision - do remember there are other computers in this form factor. I recently got an Odroid U3 and am very happy with it. Of course, it's $65, not $35. I tried setting up owncloud, nginx, a web server, etc. on a Pi and it couldn't handle it (everything ran, but terribly), the Odroid does well. I still like the Pi, though. There are some people for whom saving $30 really does ma…
My biggest gripe with the Pi is a lack of proper USB power, so if you add all the stuff you need, especially for a wireless setup it's not so cheap and compact anymore. I'm happy that they've (hopefully) fixed the USB power problem, that makes it much nicer as a platform.
I've been providing power over the GPIO header directly, and have had great results. Combine a DC-DC supply with a few smoothing capacitors on a small daughter-board, add a barrel jack + 0.1" headers to interface and you get a lot more headroom and flexibility with how you power it.
(Same-ish end result as the other fuse bypass methods, but with no soldering on the pi, and the caps seem to help with the inrush current required for hot-plugging USB devices. )
It's a tradeoff vs device safety, but is super cheap, and the operational reliability is worth it for me. Every time I stage a pi for a project that isn't powered this way, I'm surprised how much frustration is involved.
Looking forward to this improvement with the B+ as much as anything else.
[1] eg, the CUI V7805 (102-1715-ND at digikey)
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still missing a normal round power plug, as the ramshackly micro USB draws much more power then the allowed 500mA. Also Ethernet is still connected via USB, and horrible slow.
The Ethernet chip is a new one tho - maybe it's a little less terrible? (No idea - my applications for the rpi don't depend on it being a speed demon on the network.)
But as far as I read, the PI can still not boot over Ethernet, which is a requirement for me to boot into backup cycle (Installation = Restore), and it still can not wakeup on LAN.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#167Have they fixed the stability issues when it is under high load with a lot of networking traffic? I have a RaspberryPi B and each time I start a large file transfer the entire board locks up. Doesn't matter what version OS I am running either!
Have you tried another power supply? I used a "high quality" one from RS (I think) and had odd problems with disk corruption and crashes when pushing the limits. I switched to a old iPad charger and the crashing problems went away.
There is a nasty bug with overclocking and filesystem corruption that is especially easy to hit under low-power conditions. Not sure if it's been fully fixed. eg:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=26633
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still missing a normal round power plug, as the ramshackly micro USB draws much more power then the allowed 500mA. Also Ethernet is still connected via USB, and horrible slow.
Most mobile devices draw much more power than 500mA over micro USB as well, I was assuming this was in-spec now, it certainly seems to work fine. And many people have spare 1A+ chargers lying around as mobile devices tend to break before their chargers (ramshackly plug notwithstanding). Those chargers are usually really tiny, as well. So I think micro USB is a fine choice. It also lets you draw from the fairly rich e…
It will work fine in 95% of the cases, but 5% will ruin their computer USB port, because the PI is not within the specs. The PI not only draws 750mA (old) or 600mA (new) when idle, but much more, if you attach SSD, and USB devices.
The ramshackle micro USB port is a nogo for me.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I made a home heating controller with temp plotting and frost alarm out of a couple of Pis. I don't think a $5 microcontroller would have run a tiny web server, tiny email server, or the plotter code that forms the core of the project. The Pi is a fine budget Linux computer. It's not fast, it's not powerful, it's not expensive. But it's fast enough and powerful enough for embedded applications you can put online with…
That sounds cool. Do you have any more details of the home heating project? I'm considering doing something similar.
I bolted some 10A 5V relays onto the GPIO pins via a 3V3-5V converter board to switch the heating circuits on and off.
There are some standard 1-wire temp sensors - docs are easy to find online. The 1-wire protocol allows for really long cabling and doesn't need external power, so it's ideal for this kind of project
There's some incredibly simple Python code controlling the relays and reading the sensors, and GNUPLOT runs off a cron job to plot the temperatures to image files that get served in a web page via lighttpd.
Because I don't have a static IP at home the Pi pings my Linode server with its IP address every minute, and the Pi server web pages are wrapped in an iframe that pulls them off the current home IP.
The whole thing is a total hack, but it works well enough. Bottom line is I can see the indoor/pipe/tank/outdoor temps from anywhere, and the heating turns on if it thinks the pipes are going to freeze, and turns off if the water in the tank and/or room temps are warm enough. I can also turn the heating on and off remotely.
It wasn't quite trivial to do, but it wasn't a hair-tearing challenge either. So far as I can tell, it was easier than it would have been with alternative boards.
Basically anyone who knows beginner-level Linux server set-up and some very basic electronics should be able to build something like this around the Pi. It's perfect for this kind of embedded micro-server/controller project.
Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+
#170Earlier 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…
A little bit of an overclock, use SD as boot only with a fast USB stick and things work real snappy.