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Two million Raspberry Pi sold

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#71

Post by analog31 »

joezydeco wrote: post #7

I'd like to hear a little about the educational successes that RPi may have achieved since launch. That was the goal, right?

Well, it's a small and localized data point, but my kids (both in middle school) have had a blast with theirs. They've played around with a lot of things, including Scratch programming and a little bit of Python. We've gone back and forth between RPi and the desktop, since they can run pretty much the same software anywhere.

Something to consider is that the RPi wasn't launched into a vacuum like the earliest microcomputers were. So it won't have as profound of an impact.

At the lower grade levels, around 3rd through maybe 8th grade, Scratch seems to be a pretty big deal. Somehow, Scratch has been installed on every computer in our house, and a couple of Arduino boards arrived shortly after S4A was mentioned recently here on HN. I'd encourage Scratch in the schools before RPi.

The RPi has certainly been educational for me. I'm sure it wasn't the first, or the best, little Linux board. But in part due to hobbyist interest in it, there's a lot of good tutorial information out there, making it easy for someone like me (minimal formal training in programming and electronics) to create some pretty cool things.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#72

Post by calv »

sean-duffy wrote: post #55
joezydeco wrote: post #7

I'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 .

My university gave us all one when we arrived. It's just been gaining dust as my laptop runs Linux and I just do all my programming on there. That and if I wanted to do a hobby project, I have coursework to do.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#73

Post by phit_ »

na85 wrote: post #63
middleclick wrote: post #12

I would love to get a Raspberry Pi but I don't know what I would like to do with it. Suggestions?

If you're a kinkster there was a "What do you do with your Pi" post on reddit a while ago, and some guy basically programmed it to fuck his wife - the joke of course being that a true hacker will attempt to automate everything, including romance.

reference: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f607z/owners_of_...

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#75

Post by pedrocr »

imissmyjuno wrote: post #43
Derbasti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My RasPi is certainly collecting dust as well, but not for the lack of uses--It is connected to power, ethernet, and an external hard drive. I only ever access it over ssh and never need to touch it. It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!

How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.

I had the same issue and then concluded that time machine is not stable over the network. The use of the sparsebundle is basically a way of pretending that the network drive is actually a local disk and it will corrupt itself on network faults. You can probably make it work semi-reliably over a wired network but forget wifi. This is a failure of Apple's design and there's not much that can be done until they implement a sane network aware solution.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#76

Post by possibilistic »

whyenot wrote: post #51

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.

Do you have any pictures or footage? I'd love to see.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#77

Post by slug »

Derbasti wrote: post #35
joezydeco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a Beaglebone Black. Or move up to something like a Boundary Devices unit (Quad-core A9 @ 1Ghz)

Yes, I own a Beaglebone Black. But the operating system and the ecosystem surrounding it is oh so aweful compared to simply-Debian it-just-works Wheezy for the Raspberry Pi. That probably doesn't matter too much if you are building some embedded thing, but I am mostly using my Pi as a web server, and I like that is so easy to set up and configure.

It's very easy to install ubuntu on a BBB. I have 13.04 and 13.10, both running from the eMMC and uSD cards.

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu

I own 1 rpi and 2 BBBs and all work just fine. I have the rpi 24/24h connected to a relay board and other things but tend to prefer the BBB due to the better CPU and easier to keep up to date with regular distros.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#78

Post by sneak »

imissmyjuno wrote: post #43
Derbasti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My RasPi is certainly collecting dust as well, but not for the lack of uses--It is connected to power, ethernet, and an external hard drive. I only ever access it over ssh and never need to touch it. It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!

How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.

The program you're looking for is 'duplicity'. It even supports ssh/scp so you don't need any special software on the storage server.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#79

Post by justincormack »

mtgx wrote: post #57
justincormack wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Kind of slow, but the OP is talking about seconds in response time, something is going badly wrong. Software issues not CPU throughput. It doesn't help that IO is terrible, there is no point putting in a faster CPU without SATA and a bit more throughput overall.

They are in a great position for volume, so should be able to do better than the current choice that was suboptimal in so may ways. Not clear that the 64 bit stuff will be that cheap soon (plus porting code will take a while) but it depends when they are going to do something. Cheap is important.

Re: Two million Raspberry Pi sold

#80

Post by veemjeem »

imissmyjuno wrote: post #43
Derbasti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My RasPi is certainly collecting dust as well, but not for the lack of uses--It is connected to power, ethernet, and an external hard drive. I only ever access it over ssh and never need to touch it. It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!

How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.

Hmm, never encountered this issue before. I've been using the TM/netatalk mechanism for at least 3 years now, and I'm still using the same sparsebundle from 3 years ago. I'm not using a raspberry pi though.
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