Introducing Raspberry Pi B+ • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#181

Post by mikepurvis » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

kephra wrote: post #168

morsch wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to power it from the USB port. You can supply juice to the 5V and GND pins on the GPIO header. That's probably a better power inlet interface than either a ramshackle micro USB connection or a janky barrel plug.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#182

Post by stadeschuldt » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

middleclick wrote: post #19

Is anyone running a webserver or mailserver over the Pi? Curious to know how it holds up.

I am running nginx on my RPi at http://pi.tafkas.net/

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#183

Post by sitkack » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:40 PM UTC

usbreply wrote: post #175

kephra wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

reread the usb spec. it will not ruin the USB port.

What the pi should do is monitor the voltage level of port it is drawing from, if it draws it down, it should turn on a fault LED or disable onboard services (like ethernet and usb).

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#184

Post by phunge » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:53 PM UTC

ioseph wrote: post #3

Would be nice to have an audio input jack. Pretty low on space as it is though.

In theory you could use the I2S, but I went the easy route and hooked up a USB DAC (Behringer UCA-202 - good cheap DAC). Thanks to Pi's USB issues, you need to switch to USB low speed (dwc_otg.speed=1), but it's worked well.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#185

Post by MikeKusold » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

I've found SFTP to be horribly slow. I would recommend FTP instead so that the CPU doesn't need to do encryption.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#186

Post by dubfan » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 8:22 PM UTC

chillingeffect wrote: post #180

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…

Current != power. I recommend altering this to say "uses less power (600mA at X volts) than the old (750mA at Y volts)," filling in X and Y with the voltage that the systems run at. Or: "uses less power(X mW) than the old one (Y mW)," filling in X and Y wit hthe power that the systems run at.

Power = Current * Voltage so just giving the voltage doesn't help either. I believe the voltage is unchanged so stating a decrease in amperage would suffice.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#187

Post by duskwuff » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 8:37 PM UTC

kephra wrote: post #166

durin42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you load U-Boot onto an SD card, the rPi can be configured to use that to boot over Ethernet. It's not a completely "pure" network boot, but that's impossible given the hardware. (There's simply nowhere for a bootloader to live besides the SD card.)

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#188

Post by duskwuff » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 8:44 PM UTC

jedahan wrote: post #8

Much better port layout. Glad to hear audio is improved. Not sure what projects needed more pins but not complaining. Wish USB/Ethernet didn't share a bus, but I never actually ran into that being an issue yet.

> Not sure what projects needed more pins but not complaining.

The added pins include a couple of important ones from the SoC that were previously not available, or were only available on a secondary connector. You can now get JTAG over the expansion port, for instance.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#189

Post by Narishma » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 9:04 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #91

While we're here, I'd like to call attention to the fact that the Pi foundation has hired someone to opensource the X display driver, addressing one of the common criticisms about openness: http://anholt.livejournal.com/44239.html

They hired him to create an open source driver, not to open source the current one.

Re: Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

#190

Post by Ecco » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 9:56 PM UTC

tezza wrote: post #132

I went for a BeagleBone Black because I could communicate with the device over the same USB that powered it. It doesn't look as though they have made the RPI B+ communicate over the power line, are there plans for future versions to do so ?

"communicate with the device over the same USB that powered it." That's the biggest issue with the RPi and they still haven't fixed it…