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As a result of the Pi using it, the BCM2835 is now the only ARM System-on-a-Chip that has functional, open source drivers, that were provided by the vendor and not produced by reverse engineering.

This represents something of a sea-change in thinking for Broadcom, who have a reputation for poor Linux support.

I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

I think you are doing something wrong. I'm getting 8-9 MB/s using SMB shares on an external USB HDD (whcih also contains the root fs).

Check out this thread to get some pointers: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=13695

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221

Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard.

The quote refers to something that was eventually done, so what else could have been meant other than "completely open access to the hardware" was ultimately achieved? Especially considering that this article wasn't the last time someone connected with the Raspberry Pi Foundation has made this sort of misleading claim, see http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221

It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.

What makes you think I care? Whether or not the Raspberry Pi is open isn't something that particularly interests me. But claiming it is when it clearly isn't is concerning.

Not true - only one supplier has been that incompetent, and that one will wake up and ship if you cancel the order. There are plenty of alternative suppliers that promise 1-week delivery, and actually achieve faster than that. There's a factory in Wales producing 16,000 units a week, and the Foundation reckons they will have shipped 1 million units this year (the original target was 100,000).. As for what people are doing with it, you are rather behind, shipmate. Read the Foundation blog http://www.raspberrypi.org/ to catch up on what's going on.

The Raspberry Pi is more powerful than virtually every ECU ever produced but the ECU will cost you about 10x more. If the specs were known an ECU emulator and a harness to USB adapter could easily replace the ECU entirely.

And I know all too well about intermittent harness problems. Doesn't mean I wouldn't want to restore a newer classic.

As my first job out of school was for an AC Delco reman shop I know all too well how poorly ECUs are designed and manufactured. I would gladly replace the ECU with one of my own design if I could.

Eben Upton has a pretty good response to this:

We happen to have a GPU which exposes a comparatively high level (GL-like) interface, such that many of our userland functions are message passing shims. You are dealing with a GPU which exposes a lower-level interface, so LIMA driver functions often boil down to writing registers directly. These are design decisions on the part of the respective GPU teams, which have wide-ranging implications for the software and hardware structure of the devices which use the resulting cores. The VideoCore driver isn’t structured this way to pull the wool over your eyes[;] it’s structured this way because of a genuine judgment that this is the best structure given the resources we have on the chip, which includes a vector DSP to which we can offload much of the low-level register access.

As Luc Verhaegen points out in the blog comments, the code they just released is doesn't do any real, interesting work; for instance, the real work of glClear is done by making a "remote procedure call" to the presumably proprietary glClear_impl:

GL_API void GL_APIENTRY glClear (GLbitfield mask)
{
      CLIENT_THREAD_STATE_T *thread = CLIENT_GET_THREAD_STATE();
      if (IS_OPENGLES_11_OR_20(thread)) {
            GLXX_CLIENT_STATE_T *state = GLXX_GET_CLIENT_STATE(thread);

            if (state->render_callback)
                  state->render_callback();

            RPC_CALL1(glClear_impl,
                                thread,
                                GLCLEAR_ID,
                                RPC_BITFIELD(mask));
      }
}

Nevertheless, I suppose that what they did release will be helpful to most higher-level projects.

One exciting thing is the Pi can now run the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android... http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/raspberry-pi-512mb-ram-96143

On July 31 they said ICS was coming, in only 256MB RAM. They said that it was working except for sound, with a new VideoCore binary. Then they claimed (eventually, after much begging and wringing of hands) that they couldn't release it. Now they're claiming you need 512MB? First, that's a lie. Second, does this mean I'm not going to be able to run ICS on my Rev.A? Because I was promised that I could.

The idea of being able to run ICS would be more exciting if they would release it, which they don't appear to be willing or able to do. It hasn't quite reached bait and switch yet, but it's close.

I would check out the RPi forums and potentially the wiki. There are a lot of folks who use the RPi for robotics.

Here is a link to the sub forum that includes robotics, but I bet there are robotics threads in lots of other places on their forums as well:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=37

And here is the RPi wiki:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub

Feel free to ask on the forums, I have found them to be very friendly.

Ordered from raspberrypi.rsdelivers.com - one of the two that was recommended from http://www.raspberrypi.org/ page.

I looked at element14 but they didn't seem to have a casing for it, so I ended up at the other recommended place.

As a result, there's a whole lot of subtly different variants out there. Not all of them are 100% binary compatible with each other. I haven't been able to find out exactly which variant is used in the raspberry pi.

FTFF, The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. (links mine)

Still waiting for my Gertboard

Raspberry Pi

"Tupperware" cases have already been done. Its amazing what you can put Pi in!

I've not linked directly to the forum article in question, I'll leave that as a learning experience, after all, you don't want to be spoon-fed knowledge, do you?

I don't accept that. The point of the Pi is to replicate the "turn it on and start coding" spirit that us 8 bit kids grew up with.

Huh? Have you seen the thing? It doesn't even come with a system case. This is not a turnkey system.

Give-it to The Raspberry Pi foundation.
In a world that is becoming increasely dependent on computers, they strive so today's and tomorrow's children won't become mindless consumers, regarding any electronic device as magic.

I concur: Raspberry Pi + Small Display + cheap usb keyboard gives you what you're looking for, and within your budget (give or take a couple bucks).

Since the Pi + LCD listed above pull a total of less than 7 watts a piece, you should have no trouble powering several with a low-cost portable power solution, such as solar/wind generators, or hell, even a dynamo; I mean, why not?

The GPs figures are off. He is using a horrible compiler setup, not only is he using the softfloat calling convention, he is using -mthumb which AIUI will prevent the code from making direct use of the hardware FPU (and I suspect he uwas using debians version of libc preventing indirect use of the hardware fpc through libc routines)at all on armv6. According to hexxeh the povray benchmark under raspbian gives the following results under raspbian on a PI.

Total Scene Processing Times
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 16 seconds (16 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 5 minutes 57 seconds (357 seconds)
Render Time: 6 hours 13 minutes 57 seconds (22437 seconds)
Total Time: 6 hours 20 minutes 10 seconds (22810 seconds)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4256&start=175

Your price figures are off too. An i5 based compute node can be built for more like $500

Similarlly the real price of a Pi node is quite a bit more than $25. Firstly the Pi you can actually buy and would want for this task (clustering needs networking support) has a base price of $35 not $25. Secondly that price excludes things like the power power supply the SD card, the network cable and the mouning hardware. The real cost of a Pi node is probablly more like $50.

So the Pi is about 10 times lower per node than the i5

My overall conclusion is if compute power per dolar is your goal then a smamler number of i5s is a much better bet than a larger numer of Pis.

You may say, "Hey, this test is running using soft-float! If you used hard float, it'd be faster!"

Massively faster

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4256&start=175

Something that I don't thing got much play in the article is that each of the 64 Pi boards has a SOC processor that in addition to the general purpose processor also includes a 48 core processor optimized for graphics. And yes in http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1967 they note that there is already code that can use those processors for graphics. I have little doubt that someone looking at the code can port one of the gpu processing libraries to make use of these processors for other numerically intensive purposes.

So don't forget to add in sufficient video processing to provide 3072 cores of processing equivalence to your rig. I suspect that you can figure out how to do that as you've already calculated what you feel is the equivalent general processing equivalent (or better) for your sample system. I'm not sure that the resulting system would still fit in a 1u case, but it might.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Raspberry Pi pretty much what you're looking for?

fuck no, it's not. buying him a raspberry would be like buying someone a nes to get him into games industry. buying him a shitbox x86 and loading it with linux would work much better for all the things the rasp could teach him.

Saven-year-olds are already writing software using the Raspberry Pi.. It's say it would be absolutely ideal.

It's not just the lack of mounting holes. Give me a quarter inch of empty board space all the way around with no components and I don't need holes. Just build a case where the board slides in. The problem with this board design is that it has neither mounting holes nor even one single solitary contact point where you can put physical pressure on both sides of the board in the same spot without knocking components off. Opposite the CE logo are the major power regulating components for the whole board. Opposite the RPi logo are dozens of tiny surface-mount components. The closest you can get to a friction mounting involves removing the GPIO header and/or putting pressure on top of the USB stack (moderately safe) or video jack (moderately safe).

Or if I knew I wasn't ever going to use the GPIO header on a particular board, I guess I could remove it, cut the traces, and drill a screw hole in the corner where they belong, and another one almost opposite it, between the USB and Ethernet jacks, assuming there aren't any hidden traces in an inner layer of the board that I'm not able to see, but if the last board layer artwork posted (http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gerbers2.png) is correct, then it's safe to drill there. That said, since I already see GPIO pins that I know are connected, but show no traces, I don't have much faith in that image.

In Wales by Sony to be exact
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925

Nice! That would have been a far more interesting headline than "RasPi gets mounting holes and minor bugfixes".

In Wales by Sony to be exact
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925

Yes, but it actually works as opposed to the raspberry pi.

That'd probably make sense if the only USB devices you're planning on using are the keyboard and mouse. There are more problems with USB than just devices that use too much power, see this forum thread: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=12097&start=250

Supposedly the RasPi Foundation has been banning people from their forums for suggesting that new purchasers should be told about this issue, so it's probably not suprising if you haven't head about it.

Direct quote on the front page, March 3, 2012:

"On our original model, weâ(TM)d assumed that only hacker-types were going to be interested. It seems we made a mistake there" -- Liz Upton

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/723

If you recall, they were trying to sell about 10,000 to early adopters, to get software written and bugs knocked out.

There was no "early adoption phase". That's a ret-con that has been created as bugs continue to shake-out.

Show me anywhere on the homepage or FAQ that there is any mention of early adoption, debugging phase or in fact anything that suggests that you shouldn't just buy one RIGHT NOW.

You can now buy an MPEG-2 license for the Pi. See http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1839

I am the submitter of this story. I posted as "lostintime" on the Raspberry Pi forums before I was banned for the post I made in this thread: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=15320

The power supply issues the Raspberry Pi has are mostly a red herring. The Pi is certainly unusually sensitive to power and can only supply a stupidly low amount of current to USB devices no matter what power supply is used, but these issues have been used as a catch-all to explain away every problem people have been having with USB and Ethernet on the Pi. This has obscured the more pressing issue of buggy drivers which I believe are the root cause of the majority of problems Pi users have been having.

wrong - both RS and farnell are on continuous manufacturing at approx 4k each per week [ http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1588 ] there is still a large backlog to get though though.
RS seem to be worse
farnell have been delivering within the week for some people.

yes the drivers need a bit more work
yes there is no accelerated x so that runs slow -
yes they work fine if you have a good PSU and are lucky with usb keyboards .

The Pi only decode H.263 and H.264 in hardware. (Well this is not entirely correct, but you need a license to unlock the other formats, and there is no way to get the license...)

Some people are trying to decode MPEG-2 in software.

> The post Microsoft future looks like a grim world of sealed media consumption devices for most and a return to 'workstations' for the select who can afford machines costing as much as a car.

This should cheer you up:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Enjoy!

RS

I know everyone loves Arduino, but I don't get it. If you think you can explain it to me, first read specs of Raspberry Pi($35 and runs Linux, has Ethernet, USB, etc.) and STM32F4DISCOVERY ($15, 210 DMIPS, FPU, 1MB of flash, 192kB of SRAM, has USB host/device/otg, onboard 3-axis accelerometer, mic, stereo DAC with speaker driver, JTAG debugger also built in).

With those two on the market, I don't see what Arduino is for...

Bus Pirate: good for looking at communication waveforms to debug problems. ($35)

Logic Sniffer: For more complex problems than the above, allows looking at parallel signals.($50)

Raspberry Pi: Tiny ARM11 700MHz CPU with powerful graphics, 10/100 ethernet, USB2.0 host (2 ports), HDMI out, and GPIO connector. Boots from SD card. ($35)

MSP430 Launchpad: inexpensive microcontroller development platform ($4.30)

STM32F4Discovery: Development platform for powerful microcontroller. ARM Cortex M4 with FPU, 168MHz (210DMIPS), Ethernet MAC, 2xUSB host/device/OTG, etc. etc. Board has stereo audio DAC with speaker driver, USB Micro-AB connector, 3-axis accelerometer, digital mic, 4 user LEDs, two pushbuttons (one is reset), and onboard debugger which is supported by open source tools. ($15) <--- take that, arduino

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510510.do
http://www.digilentinc.com/index.cfm
http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
http://www.parallax.com/

Your worldview is pie in the sky.

Pi in the sky: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1620

Raspberry Pi presold sight unseen over 350,000 units while restricted to one-per-customer. They ramped up the factory to 4,000 units a day - a run rate of 1.5 million units a year. They're little bare project boards. We're not even sure what we can do with them yet. Now that the schools they were intended for can order them in the bulk appropriate to the use of entire school districts full of students they may ramp quite a bit. School districts order in the dozens of units for test/dev and for deployment up to tens or hundreds of thousands so in the launch enthusiasm for RPi they were pretty much shut out so far. It doesn't hurt at all that their HDMI video output is standard input for flat panel monitors and TV's these past few years, so displays for them are everywhere and likely to last far longer than the PCs they came with.

If a bunch of hardware OEMs aren't snapping to attention over this they should be. The march of tiny low power ARM platforms seems to not want to stop. Now we have the Android TV dongle, five of these SBCs including the one in the fine article, a Kickstarter for OUYA that raised $5.3 million so far in 11 days from 41,000 backers who have no guarantee the product will ever even be made, on the strength of the reputation of the participants and the description of a product that isn't anticipated even being made until 9 months out - if they succeed in making it at all. That so many would put so much of their own personal money on only the promise of a thing is evidence of immense underlying demand for something.

Of course over in China and India they're making about a thousand different kinds of low-cost Android devices including a 7" tablet that costs $40 and runs Android ICS. Then there's the Nexus 7 tablet which sold out in retail stores around the planet on launch day and the 16GB version is even sold out on the Google Play store until further notice and the 8GB version probably soon will be - most of them were presold before they even hit the shelves. This one alone may move 10 million units the first year or more. Maybe much more. It's a product that may have buyers camped out at retailers awaiting fresh shipments like they were iThings.

The iThings are going great by the way, moving about a 500,000 units a day between iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch - every one a neat little ARM PC. And they just opened up the China market, which is like a whole third of everybody.

At last report little Android ARM PCs that also happen to have cellular phone capability are also doing well, activating 1,000,000 units a day - a run rate of 365,000,000 per year and still growing at a 2.5x pace year over year. And early next year come little ARM SOCs with 75% more processing power and 2x the graphics power for about the same price - and the SBCs that are made from them. Wow, the pace of progress here is stunning. It's like the early '90s again in PC land.

The traditional PC is stagnant. If you have one that's not too old you probably can suffer through another couple years with it, or until it fails completely, and save the money you would have put to a new one on one of these amazing new things. It's not like your laptop isn't already overpowered for what you're using it for. People have a certain budget for neat new gear anyway, and with adequate laptops costing $300 it's not like there's not money left over in the US market even if it is time to update your PC. The traditional PC market isn't going to collapse right away but I think it has peaked, plateaued, and begun its long gradual decline. In time, all things end.

All of these new things work wonderfully together, a

Check here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Mine arrived today
I plan on loading ARMed slack on it ASAP
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=6132&start=100

The article summary says $35, but http://www.raspberrypi.org/ states $25. Which is accurate?

its more like $45 and 10 week waiting time in reality.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=10516&p=119100&hilit=web+browsing#p118172

Check the FAQ:

The Model A will cost $25 and the Model B $35, plus local taxes.

and

Model A has been redesigned to have 256Mb RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port.

Never mind, I found it here http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

How much will it cost?

The Model A will cost $25 and the Model B $35, plus local taxes.

Here's the FAQ page link http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs Pic is here, looks cool! Arstechnica has an article about a Korean made, $129 Arm device http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/korean-company-offers-3-5-inch-quad-core-arm-linux-computer-for-129/?comments=1#comments-bar

The article summary says $35, but http://www.raspberrypi.org/ states $25. Which is accurate? Is there more than one model?

The Allwinner A10 has an incomplete 72 page summary of features that calls itself a datasheet compared to a fairly nice 205 page peripheral datasheet for the Broadcom BCM2835 SOC in the Raspberry Pi.

The Allwinner A10, like the BCM2835, uses closed source proprietary libraries to access 3D features of its GPU. The MALI 400 GPU is being reverse engineered which is why there is a preliminary open source GPU driver.

The Allwinner A10 CPU/GPU are faster but less efficient and use more power than the Raspberry Pi's BCM2835.

The Rhombus Allwinner A10 has no final cost yet unlike the Raspberry Pi. They are hoping to hit a $15 price point if they purchase 100,000 units. The Raspberry Pi is available today at $35 which was achieved with only an initial 10,000 units purchased.

The Raspberry Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs would seem to be a good match

Naw, man. It's a '77 van, he's got to go all original.

He's got to install a PDP-11 with a tape drive.

He can call the van the "Q-Bus". Now, how cool would that be?

The Raspberry Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs would seem to be a good match as it's tiny, is portable, has very low power requirements, dissipates very little heat, costs next to nothing, and is powerful enough to run full-HD video!

it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.'

A low cost personal computer that encourages tinkering? That sounds awfully familiar.

Shame that the hardware is the easiest part of the solution. Gates is correct there too, curriculum and competent teachers are going to be the biggest obstacle.