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Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#121

Post by VLM »

mrmondo wrote: post #116
WatchDog wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little cheaper, but not $35: http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-mod...

That's still $50 though, at that price I'm just not sure its worth it - especially since it only has a 10/100 NIC and USB 2.0 while those specs might be an acceptable for educational purposes, at $50+ hobbyists may not find it the most cost effective solution.

"especially since it only has a 10/100 NIC"

I'm my experience I've found it hard to push the CPU/memory/"disk" enough to saturate the NIC, so don't worry about it.

The limiter to streaming multiple high def video streams (one at a time is OK) or doing SDR/DSP work doesn't seem to be the NIC.

I'm having trouble thinking of a real app that wouldn't be memory/SD card/CPU limited on my pi that would simultaneously be limited by the NIC. By real app, I don't mean sending ping floods or running weird benchmarks, or something that isn't an app, like transferring a file.

My main pain point with the pi hardware at this time is there's some JVM stuff I'd like to fool around with where I'm totally patient with something that takes an imperceptible 5 ms on the desktop taking a still imperceptible 50 ms on the pi, but can't handle only having a half gig of ram.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#122

Post by durin42 »

kephra wrote: post #93
schappim wrote: post #24

What's the same: - Same Broadcom BCM2835 Chipset - Same 512MB RAM - Same full size HDMI port - Same 10/100 Ethernet port - Same CSI camera port and DSI display ports - Same micro USB power supply connection What has changed: - Now comes with 4 USB ports so you can now connect more devices than ever to your Raspberry Pi. - There is a 40pin extended GPIO so you can build even bigger and better projects than ever before…

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.)

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#123

Post by mrmondo »

kephra wrote: post #93
schappim wrote: post #24

What's the same: - Same Broadcom BCM2835 Chipset - Same 512MB RAM - Same full size HDMI port - Same 10/100 Ethernet port - Same CSI camera port and DSI display ports - Same micro USB power supply connection What has changed: - Now comes with 4 USB ports so you can now connect more devices than ever to your Raspberry Pi. - There is a 40pin extended GPIO so you can build even bigger and better projects than ever before…

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.

Yes I agree, the Ethernet is the one thing (other than the price in Australia) that stops me from using a pi

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#124

Post by VLM »

koralatov wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). I…

> The use case of the Pi is a computer that can be given to small > children to be theirs, I completely agree with this part... > to be a counterpart to the BBC Micro of thirty years ago. But I don't really agree with this part. The BBC Micro was much more expensive in real terms when it launched, and never got down to an equivalent price during its lifespan. Only when it became a hand-me-down, replaced by something…

"became a hand-me-down"

Speaking of "hand-me-down", the pi kind of kills the used/junker PC marketplace for little experimental projects, when you can work on your project instead of debugging old/worn out hardware for only $40 or so. Also it uses about 1/10th the power of a repurposed desktop, so why not.

For an experiment, I could pick up a free, dusty, worn out desktop that draws 100 watts and stick a new small/tiny hard drive in it for about $50 and have a giant paperweight that needs hardware troubleshooting, or spend the same cash on something tiny that draws about as much power as a clock radio and is new so presumably more reliable.

Its hard to justify picking up junker "free" PCs in the era of the pi.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#125

Post by VLM »

One funny social dynamic to watch with the pi is you give people a little computer with specs that would be pretty good five or so years ago and you get some responses like:

"Humanity didn't use computers five years ago at all, for any purpose, being capable of doing anything that was done five years ago is inherently totally useless today and any thought of it should be abolished because I say so la la la I'm not listening to your real world examples la la la and that's somehow your problem not mine la la la". If you ram it past their self censorship to prove there exists a real world application for a five year old computer they get really angry. Its kind of funny to watch.

Maybe its astroturfing from people selling more powerful computers.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#126

Post by pjc50 »

ibrahima wrote: post #14
ekianjo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is the case since they announced "reduced power consumption" ?

When they say reduced power consumption, they're really talking about overhead. Let's say to supply 5W at 5V, they needed to take in 7W at 120V. This means that voltage step down process results in some power being wasted as heat. By using a switching regulator they waste less power and thus there's less heat output, but the power delivered to the device remains the same. So, in this example, they might only need to…

The numbers are referring to the wrong voltages entirely. It takes in 5V and down-converts that to 3.3V, 2.5V and 1.8V.

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-mode...

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#128

Post by userbinator »

girvo wrote: post #96
userbinator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A platform with less legacy crap than x86 is wonderful for learning about OS development. I don't know how the Pi fares for this, with Broadcom's chip and all, but if I had the free time to hack an OS in my spare time, not dealing with all the thirty year-old cruft nor shedding a gazillion EUR on a PowerPC system would be ideal. Actually I'd say the x86/PC is probably one of the best-documented and most stable plat…

This is something I'm very interested in, and nearly bought a Pi today; I want a board that I can learn ARM assembly and C on to build a toy OS. I built half of a tiny kernel on X86 (woo real-mode!) nearly a decade ago, so I know a tiny bit about it all, but I'd assumed the Pi was a great target: well priced, tonnes of them out there so hopefully well documented, etc. What would you suggest instead? I'm considering j…

If you're looking for something in the Pi price range, a Beaglebone Black seems about right and the TI SoC it uses has tons of publicly available, detailed documentation. On the other hand, if you want more features/periperals/cores, and don't mind not-so-thorough documentation, one of the boards based on Chinese SoCs could be more fun...

Here's a huge list of others: http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/low-cost-arm-boards

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#129

Post by ShaneCurran »

kenrikm wrote: post #4

I hope the USB ports will now output enough voltage to actually power common peripherals without using a hub.

It's nothing to do with the voltage, USB is always 5v. It's about the current these ports can draw, which is 1.2A for the 4 (i.e. 0.3A each if all 4 are under load)

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#130

Post by ShaneCurran »

kenrikm wrote: post #4

I hope the USB ports will now output enough voltage to actually power common peripherals without using a hub.

It's nothing to do with the voltage, USB is always 5v. It's about the current these ports can draw, which is 1.2A for the 4 (i.e. 0.3A each if all 4 are under load)
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