A Least Half a Million Raspberry Pis Sold

hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that it could have sold over a million units of its credit-card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi. Announcing the achievement, the foundation wrote that one of its distributors, Element14, has sold over half a million units of the Raspberry Pi, and even though the foundation doesn't have up-to-date figures from its other distributor, RS Components, it is expecting to have sold its millionth unit of the computer."

Comments

They are remarkably versatile

[Muad'Dave]

Curse duplicate articles - I always end up posting in the wrong one. In that post you'll see a couple of things I use them for. I also plan on making a sporadic-E monitor for 6m, 2m, and 70cm amateur bands. That way it can ping me when there's DX afoot.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[vlm]

Like http://www.dxmaps.com/spots/map.php?Lan=E&Frec=50&ML=M&Map=NA

Or do you mean a map maker, or something that actually gathers the raw data?

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[Muad'Dave]

B. something that actually gathers the raw data.

I love and use that site and am subscribed to get alerts. The problem is that I get alerts for openings where I can't hear anything as well as no alert when there's an opening I can use. If I scan the SSB portions of those bands, I can tell when there's an opening at my QTH, and maybe even include an audio snippet in the email. I could also include what stations the cluster 'heard' in the freq that popped my local squelch. If I wanted to have my house look like a Navy ship, I could use a constantly-rotating antenna and include the azimuth of the signal. (or 'rotate' the antenna electronically; hummm......)

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[Anonymous Coward]

'popped my local squelch'

yeah I get that a lot too - I think it's an age thing

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[vlm]

maybe even include an audio snippet in the email.

Maybe if you SDR'd it you could include an image. I've always wondered what 6 looks like during a big opening during a contest. I already know what it sounds like...

Also sometimes you can ID beacons looking at a waterfall. I've done that on 20m.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[HermMunster]

They could have sold many times that if they'd actually upped production so we could buy them.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[Muad'Dave]

I've done the visual beacon ID thing a few times. My CW skills are fairly poor, so sometimes that's the best way for me to ID a beacon. :-( I'm usually running MacLoggerDX and CocoaModem for RTTY and other HF modes (including CW), and the waterfall comes in handy.

You know about the CW skimmers, right? They digitize a chunk of spectrum, decode all the CW CQ's and callsigns and report them up to the mother ship. Sometimes helpful, oft abused.

I thought of another use, too. I'd like to have it monitor 50.250-50.280 or so for FSK441 meteor scatter signals. The possibilities are endless!

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[Muad'Dave]

I think they've done remarkably well considering this was a shoestring operation from the start and they only expected to sell 10k units. I think they've dealt with a 100x increase in demand fairly well.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[T0nz0fFun]

Sporadic-E monitor would be great.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[HermMunster]

I don't agree. The product has been out for a good long time. They've had long periods where we couldn't get any. Then they opened up to mass purchases leaving those that couldn't get any before still out in the cold. It is rare that you'll actually find a Pi for sale in the US. When they are they are gone just as fast as they showed up.

Re:They are remarkably versatile

[Muad'Dave]

Remember that this initiative was out of the UK originally and was aimed at turbocharging the CS curriculum at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. I'm amazed they've done as well as they have in the US given they didn't get FCC certification until April 2012; literally minutes before they went on sale.

I ordered 5 from newark.com on November 17th. They were shipped on Nov 27th. Three were defective - I RMA'd them on Jan 7th and got the replacement ones (which were all ok - whew!) a 3-4 days later.

From their website: "7200 Expected to ship 6 Feb, 2013". When I ordered mine they were backordered until Dec 26th, but mine came early. I assume their estimate is worst-case.

Go ahead and order some - they won't charge your card until they ship, so you're not out anything. I know one thing for sure - you won't get any unless you bite the bullet and order some!

Is it time for the $1,500 Apple iPi yet?

[Andy Prough]

You know Jobs must have left detailed plans for it.

What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering what people are actually using the Pi's for. I haven't heard of the killer app to run on these things yet.

Re:What do they do?

[Anrego]

I'll admit I haven't done this yet (can't get my hands on one!) but I plan to use two as a cheap drivers for my 5'th and 6'th monitor. Currently I'm using an old (AMD sempton 7something) box to do this, but a Raspberry Pi should do nicely (all I really need is an X server as I just forward the apps to the display currently..)

Re:What do they do?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

They aren't a killer app type of product, they are something that a hobbyist can play around with. At $25 or $35 they are almost disposable and can be the basis for all sorts of projects. They are small, portable, and don't require much power, and cheap. I want to see if I can create a RTK like setup (it won't be realtime) but need to first find some USB GPS receivers that will dump the raw data instead of already processed data.

Re:What do they do?

[MBGMorden]

A lot of people seem to be using them as home theater PC's. They apparently run XBMC quite well. I would be all over one right now if I didn't already have an AppleTV running Crystalbuntu.

Re:What do they do?

[Grench]

It's an educational product - a little Linux computer that is designed to be cheap (major plus-point for schools) and provide all the tools necessary to learn about computing and programming. It has a kind of "Geek Port" on it (a bit like the old BeBox did) where you can connect up all kinds of electronic breadboards (homebrew or shop-bought) and you can use the Pi to interface with these things. Car-PC guys have been going nuts over the Pi, for instance.

My own Pi is for Samba4 - I currently have an old budget AMD-powered box that used for running Win2003 server to provide Active Directory, file/print, and some SNMP polling for my Cisco routers (via Cacti) - it is basically idle, yet draws a lot more power than the Pi does, and takes up a hell of a lot more space than the Pi does, and makes a lot more noise than the Pi does. I shut that server down every night because it's too wasteful of electricity - not so the Pi, so I'll also be installing a TACACS and RADIUS server on it so I can teach myself about those technologies. I am also using this as a way to teach myself about Linux as I've never really had much success with it so far. It seems to be quite a capable little machine - the processor isn't as powerful as the one in my old Win2K3 box but it doesn't need to be in order to get the job done.

Re:What do they do?

[spire3661]

I deployed one as a webserver at my in-laws. My father-in-law is a psychologist with a small but lucrative client base. He currently has a website running on a host from netsol @ $140/year. I looked at his metrics and he gets a hit a day if hes lucky. I dropped his website on the raspberry pi and am serving it from his house under a different URL. If the site holds up after a year, ill move the domain over to his house server and save $140/year. While not a killer app, it exposes a real world use case. I think that you wont find a 'killer app', but rather a huge range of special use cases.

Re:What do they do?

[sisukapalli1]

I've set it up as a gateway into my home network (low power, can leave it on, no spinning disks), and not worry about needing it for something else... Runs all the basic stuff, ssh, wordpress, and I have it on a screen with things like emacs loaded.

It doesn't do anything that bigger computers can't, so, unless the form factor issues are critical, there aren't many killer apps.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering what people are actually using the Pi's for.

First, half a million of these will build a decent sized Beowulf cluster. What you'd do with that all depends on what type of super villan you are.

Re:What do they do?

[jones_supa]

I'm wondering what people are actually using the Pi's for. I haven't heard of the killer app to run on these things yet.

That's up to you to decide. It's a hacking platform.

Re:What do they do?

[spire3661]

'quite well' is a bit of an overstatement. It plays videos wonderfully, but the menu system is laggy as hell. They would be better served stripping out a ton of stuff and just offering up a video player interface. Make it super simple, like putting in a DVD.

Re:What do they do?

[Hrshgn]

Mine is controlling the heating system in my house using FHEM. It replaces an old notebook which was previously doing the same job.

Re:What do they do?

[chill]

I'm wanting one for XBMC. Specifically http://openelec.tv/, which has a RaspPi build.

Once someone gets one in stock, I'll order one. Three more if they work as advertised. It looks perfect, combined with one of these.

Re:What do they do?

[slim]

It runs Linux. It can do anything Linux can do, as long as you can live with somewhat limited RAM and CPU speed.

I added a USB hard drive to mine, grabbed a SqueezePlug SD card image, and I'm using it as the MP3 server for my Squeezebox audio players. SqueezePlug started as a bundle of Debian + Logitech Media Server built for PogoPlugs, then also various NAS devices. The Raspberry Pi turned out to be such perfect hardware for the purpose, that the developer has dropped support for other devices.

Prior to that, I left my Mac Mini up 24/7 running Logitech Media Server. It would leak memory and leave the OSX desktop unusable. The Pi uses less power, it's easier to admin, and it's silent.

I do feel I should experiment with other uses -- mine has never had a mouse, keyboard or monitor connected. Just a USB hard disk and ethernet.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a terrible time with the menus...a faster sd card has made it quite usable albeit a bit slower than I'd like...about comparable to running xbmc on my apple tv 2. I got a class 10 sdhc card from Costco so nothing overly special.

I also use a remote mysql database for the library.

Re:What do they do?

[slim]

Also, a 5MP camera addon is imminent. I'll be sorely tempted to get another Pi for some low budget Kite Aerial Photography. Just set it to take a photo every 10 seconds, and launch it.

Re:What do they do?

[Quiet_Desperation]

If it's for his practice, can't he just write it off?

Re:What do they do?

[DeliriumNocturnum]

I'm using my 512 Pi for XBMC (via Raspbmc) and it has come a long way. Booting from SD but running the OS from a USB drive really improves the speed and navigation of menus, so that there is little to no lag now. I really enjoy using XBMC now (CEC passthrough and I don't even need a separate remote). For $35 and effectively using a device that was never designed to do what I'm using it for, I have zero complaints.

Re:What do they do?

[highvista63]

I use mine to run the Logitech Media Server software to serve out my music from a USB flash drive to my Squeezebox Boom, Touch, and Radio. It's wonderful to have such a low-power solution to an always-on service.

Re:What do they do?

[samkass]

Just order it from Element14 and get on the waitlist. They get stock every few days and fill their backorder first. You'll probably have it in 2 weeks or less.

Re:What do they do?

[PurpleAlien]

Hi.

We have a GPS Tracking solution that supports the R-Pi as a base station. We're currently trying to get it funded on Kickstarter so we can fully Open Source it:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/385904042/remote-gps-tracking

Johan

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

MCM Electronics: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi

In stock now. Got mine from there in a week or so.

Re:What do they do?

[Patch86]

Depends on what you consider to be a "killer app" I suppose. I have mine running Debian as a very cheap, very low power-draw "always on" computer for my home network, to mastermind a few background tasks, run a few low intensity "server" applications, and to act as an SSH-able gateway to my home network. You wouldn't be able to find much better for that sort of task for $35.

I've also used mine to run RISC OS 5, which runs beautifully on it. For anyone nostalgic for that old system, there is no better way to put together a fully functioning replica of your old Acorn boxes using modern hardware.

Really though, it's not about "killer apps". As sibling posters have said, it's about having computers so cheap that you can use them in any old hobby project, regardless of how idle the project or how likely it is to accidentally destroy the hardware. If that doesn't appeal to you, it probably isn't worth buying one.

Re:What do they do?

[pfaffa]

FYI, class 10 can actually be slower than class 8 for certain applications

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need USB? I'd think that a GPS module that speaks SPI or I2C would be cheaper, easier, and would almost certainly dump the raw data.

Re:What do they do?

[ediron2]

A: $140?! At near-zero bandwidth, unless storage is large (i.e., you're storing 10+ gigs of data on the site for public access), find a cheaper provider. Asmallorange's lowest plan is a few bucks per month. Amazon's cloud stuff may be almost free, too, based on a hit/day metric.
B: I'd presume FIL is writing off the expense, so real after-tax cost is down roughly a third from there. $30 bucks becomes $20.
C: With domain registration, you'll still end up having some cost. Back up to $30.
D: If all you get is a hit a day, focus on correct info on various high-scoring results: (yourstate) (your name) (your specialty). Don't obsess, but think about it occasionally.
E: 9/10ths of local advertising mechanisms that are begging (BEGGING!) for your business will create little web-presence improvements free with any ad purchased. Instead of considering $140 a year expensive (!), do little PR things: clean up or add data for local-hospital / local/state registries / WebMD / yelp / yellow page / local newspaper / chamber of commerce presence. Analyze where clients come from, and do 80/20 effort on the sure stuff and the stuff I just mentioned - The ROI for small psych practices might be negligible, but he WILL pick up clients based on people stumbling across his name in these places, or by recommendations.
F: look at his home broadband contract: running a server from there could get DOS'd by the ISP noticing him, could get a price increase for violation of a 'no hosting' clause, and could just get DOS'd because the ISP doesn't notice him: my self-administered exim server got to be too much of a PITA eventually, with my ISP doing random things to silence rogue spam daemons.

Having said that, I'm also running tiny sites or daemons from a wrt54g, from a few Amahi servers, a Shiva (and have friends doing everyhting from FREESCO to PWNIE to RPi). Rock on. Just recognize that $140 a year isn't a good business motive.

Re:What do they do?

[MachineShedFred]

Don't use USB. Use the integrated I2C bus, and this thing. It's cheaper, doesn't suck power through the already limited USB on the RPi, and gives you 10 location updates per second in exactly the form you're looking for.

Re:What do they do?

[spire3661]

A. Hes not a good business man, but a great Dr. He is also 70+ years old and his practice is winding down. I have offered help with SEO etc, but hes not interested.

B. He has no budget, no writes offs, pro-bono accountant (/wrists)

C. He has an office with a business connection, i plan on moving the device to the business connection when/if i take it live. As of now, the only person hitting the site at his house is me.

D. I realize i could get a better deal on hosting, but keep in mind all my work on this is pro-bono and I went with something quick and dirty.

E. The whole idea was to prove it could be done for our use-case, was never about the money in and of itself.

F. Thank you for your insight.

Re:What do they do?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

That looks to be exactly what I am looking for. I am not a hardware guy so I didn't even know what to look for on that end and just assumed that I would be stuck looking at something like USB or RS232->USB connections. I think that it might be time to start buying some parts. This is one of things I love about this site is there is probably someone who knows exactly what you need.

Re:What do they do?

[yurtinus]

I've never quite understood this... Expenses are expenses, aren't they?

Re:What do they do?

[bjoeg]

I had the same plans when I bought my Pi. But along the way I found out that there was a bit cutier gadget with better hardware for XBMC, but in general for other programmed stuff too.

The MK 802 series (there is I, II and III models), UG802, GK802 etc. There are the size of a bigger USB stick, contains HDMI, WLAN, flash, more RAM than Pi, higher clocked and dual/quad core CPU than Pi and some even bluetooth.

Costs a bit more, can run Android and XBMC from there, though not all got direct hardware codec support yet.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmmm. Do you know if it'll run the Linux versions of Mame? Like SDLmame or Xmame?

I need something for an arcade cabinet I'm building, and resurrecting my old busted computer is running into brick walls.

Re:What do they do?

[evilviper]

Also, a 5MP camera addon is imminent. I'll be sorely tempted to get another Pi for some low budget Kite Aerial Photography. Just set it to take a photo every 10 seconds, and launch it

Please explain how an old Android cell phone isn't superior in EVERY WAY to a Pi for this task.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

The way you phrase that question sounds like you don't want to hear an answer.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the raspberry pi and a mk802 III. Both are cool devices but I think the raspberry pi is better for xbmc and hacking, while the mk802 III is great for browsing the web, playing flash videos, and most other media purposes.

Why do I think the pi is better for xbmc? one word Raspbmc, its a xbmc focused distro that has perfect CEC support (tv controller can be used to operate xbmc flawlessly), Full SSH and FTP support, and enough ram/cpu power left over to run a low traffic webserver. Plus I love the open nature of the pi and am looking forward to finding something to do with its GPIO pins.

The mk802 III is also cool, but its Android only (there's an effort to port ubuntu to it, but it will be a while before its finished). Plus you need to hunt down directions on how to root it, and you can't ssh into it, can't run a server, etc. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, Its powerful and its really awesome for running android apps on the tv. But It is not as fun as the pi.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2013 and you can't get a Raspberry Pi?

Have you also failed to see Gangnam Style?

Re:What do they do?

[aztracker1]

Have you tried a Roku or WD TV? The advantage of the Roku is Amazon Prime Video *AND* Netflix, while the WD TV has broader format support... YMMV though as straight media devices they work.

Re:What do they do?

[yourlord]

I got mine in the middle of last month from Element14. It arrived 3 days after I ordered it and they said it would take weeks.

I ran it for a couple of weeks with raspbian as a print server and last night I replaced my old TV connected media PC that ran XBMC with the Pi running OpenELEC. The media files are stored on a FreeBSD server in my basement and the Pi accesses them through an NFS mount. Works great for everything so far, though the interface is a bit more laggy than the old media PC. It's still very usable and for the power savings over that old P4 machine it replaced I'll deal with the minor lag.

I have several SDHC cards with different config images on them (print server, XBMC, etc).. It's nice to have a little low power device which can change into a completely new machine by simply swapping a little SD card.

Re:What do they do?

[evilviper]

The way you phrase that question sounds like you don't want to hear an answer.

I phrased the question that way because I don't EXPECT to get an answer.

I am very open to getting an intelligent response that I had simply never thought of, but I think that's pretty unlikely.

Re:What do they do?

[Pieroxy]

It's 2013 and you can't get a Raspberry Pi?

Have you also failed to see Gangnam Style?

He's still waiting for the nyan cat video to end.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning a $10 webcam into a network camera
IRC bot
VOIP/SIP server for a small office
mumble server
Gate One ssh server
car dash computer
Ethernet gateway for a bunch of microcontrollers

Not that those couldn't be done with a hacked router, or a real computer, just that they required less effort/money for the precise situation.

The VOIP and mumble servers are actually paying for themselves by the cost of electricity saved in the 6 months.

Re:What do they do?

[lothos]

Move him over to a shared hosting plan for $12-15 a year. Many providers have plans in that price range.

Re:What do they do?

[HornWumpus]

They're still expenses. But you can think of them as being discounted by your marginal tax rate.

Re:What do they do?

[yurtinus]

Right, so buy the thing you don't need because it's less than full price ;)

This is why I didn't go into business or finance!

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a USB->VGA dongle....

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how about downloading Python if you're interested in "the tools necessary to learn about computing and programming"?

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

There's a father/son project that turns their multitude of Pis into a semi-super computer.

It doesn't take much to figure out what the Pis are used for. Just go to the web and look it up. People seem to be using it as a media center. I use mine as a media center, web server, and samba server, all at the same time.

Though the media center seems to be the most common use it is by far the only being that it is a general computing device unlike the ATV which is just a closed media center for Apple and their content provider's content.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

> GPS receivers that will dump the raw data instead of already processed data.

the magic words to search for is you need access to the raw pseudo-ranges.

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

Actually "quite well" is an understatement. It plays videos impressively. The system menus are laggy because there's no X and thus no 2d accelerated desktop components, because technically there is no desktop. Distros like raspbmc and openelec don't use X. It's not even installed. Hence it doesn't consume RAM nor require configuration.

If you want a full desktop you can get the distro recommended by the raspberrypi.org that implements a desktop and allows you to run GUI apps. Even without a desktop you can still ssh into your Pi and do updates, monitor temperature, update the packages (and install new or remove old ones) from your desktop/laptop computer without having to get up and to type away at the Pi's keyboard.

If you overclock the system this performance improves. It doesn't void the warranty if you don't exceed their OC limits. Even so, it's only $35.00, so if you blow one buy another. My Pi is overclocked in all categories, which isn't hard to do nor hard to determine issues with overclocking. Adjust up or down as you see it is stable or unstable. If it helps to run this off a USB HDD rather than a flash drive (which are known to be slow to write) then do so. For simplicity sake I don't run from an external USB HDD. I do have my Drobobox attached with 4 drives installed in it, and I have samba set up so any computer can access those files from shares created on the Pi. I've played 3 videos on different computers, via these shares, including one of them on the Pi (and music on another computer) at the same time with little to no lag on the Pi.

You can also use XBMC remotes such as yatse (which is far better than the remote from the XBMC devs). You'll not notice the screen lag and it won't annoy you because you aren't interacting with the screen. XBMC can be configured to enable the web server allowing access your Pi's XBMC via your web browser (to start and stop and queue up content). With remote control software (for Android) like yatse and the XBMC dev's remote you can even browse the web (or, if you have a favorite podcast player, browse your available podcasts (either stored locally or directly from the web)), and then tell your android device to play on an external player. Doing so directs the URL to your Pi's XBMC. In otherwords you could be watching a video podcast on your Android device and with a tap tell it to begin playing that same podcast on your Pi's XBMC.

The Pi also has a distribution that is targeted to run Asterisk. Currently I have a mini itx mobo running an asterisk server. For me, it would be nice to have asterisk installed and configured with my current Pi.

There are few if any media boxes that provide DVD support. The ATV, many Google TV boxes, the ROKU, the WD media box, the Boxee Box, and the various other dual core and quad core Pi copycats don't have DVD support. Nearly no tablet (Android, iOS, nor Win8) support DVD drives yet play media well. With the Pi you can at least plug in an external DVD drive and with the right software, such as libdvdcss2, you can play back DVD content, that is, if the distro you chose hasn't removed support (which would be very short sighted). Support for any given device that is supported in Linux is also supported on EVERY Pi, IF, the distro chose to LEAVE those features in rather than remove them in an effort to shave off some memory demands. Even so, this doesn't preclude someone else from adding it back, BECAUSE Linux is Open Source, hence so are the distributions for the Pi.

There's really no comparing the ATV product to the Pi.

Re:What do they do?

[xQx]

Wdtv costs more, and doesn't run XBMC.

It's interface is better than that of your standard 3d tv, but it's no XBMC.

Also, while it ships with a remote, it's got no CEC support, so you can't use your TV remote the way you can with a raspberry pi.

Re:What do they do?

[aztracker1]

Fair enough.. Buy it is a complete package that does the job pretty well. Just a suggestion for those not planning on much tinkering...

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

I generally don't reply to my own posts, but I had a couple followup points. DVD support was added to XBMC nightly builds in mid November, 2012. That means you need only the libdvdcss2 library installed to play back commercial DVDs. I also tested to see if I could just hook up an external USB DVD drive and whether it would detect it. It does.

As I was closing my browser tabs to end my day something caught my eye in regards to the "not all USB devices are supported on the Pi". In reality that is an extremely misleading statement. The Pi uses the same kernels as regular Linux so technically it will support every device that regular Linux distros support. That includes just about every USB device on the planet.

What the article went off about was that the ports on the Pi don't provide enough power to run some devices straight up. This is not an uncommon situation for any computer, desktop or laptop. Often the USB ports provide insufficient power to power on an external laptop HDD, and obviously an external USB CD/DVD. Some manufacturers of these external devices (primarily laptop based external HDDs) provided a split cable that allowed you to plug into two laptop USB ports and in some cases two PC USB ports to get enough power to drive the external device.

In the case of a full sized external HDD those normally come with their own power adapter. In the case of virtually ALL USB CD/DVD drives they come with their own power brick. This has been the case going way back; probably even a decade back.

The article that was referenced also indicated that it would be likely be necessary to have a powered USB hub for this situation. That could be considered blatantly wrong or in the least extremely misleading, or whomever wrote it doesn't understand hubs and why you would use them. Most powered USB hubs provides barely an additional 5v of power. That means you would run into the same kind of problem with it that you are experiencing with the Pi (not having enough power to drive all the devices you might want to attach to the hub). Because the external drives (CD/DVD and HDD) generally provide their own power brick it isn't commonly necessary to consider a powered hub for those reasons. You may still need one for different reasons but you will almost never use one to power an external HDD/CD/DVD USB drive.

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

A Pi running a web server from his home needs no justification or consideration of reduction of ongoing external charges. He's removed the $140.00 totally except maybe the dollar or two a year he pays in electricity to run it.

In other words he's fine running the Pi and he need not consider these other services albeit cheaper ones for what he's set up is perfectly fine.

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

The device itself is the killer app.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

This class 10 card, in this application was a heck of a lot faster than the class 6 that I was using previously and probably infinitely faster than a class 8, as there appears to be no record of a class 8 SD card that I can find....

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is sweet.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're correct. It only saves what you would have paid in taxes.

So if you pay 20% tax on your income, a $100 expense will only 'cost' you $20.

But then there's the paperwork.

Re:What do they do?

[slim]

Yes, it runs MAME (whyever would it not? It's more powerful than the 486 I first used for MAME).

It'll run the old 8 bit emulations with ease; I guess there might be newer games it'll struggle with.

I wasn't able to find a viable way to make it drive a 15KHz arcade monitor, so you'd have to use a VGA monitor. For me that detracts from the authenticity. There are x-in-1 arcade boards of dubious legality that do a wonderful job of putting vintage arcade games on a real JAMMA cab.

Re:What do they do?

[slim]

That's a pretty good idea.

RPi was my first instinct for this because I already know how to program it. I had an idle look at Android programming, but when getting the tools to talk to a phone over USB (on Windows) didn't work first time, I decided not to spend any more time on it.

I suppose there's a time lapse camera app out there I could use as-is.

Re:What do they do?

[Lando]

Perhaps the learning curve to do this on android is higher than it is on the pi, or maybe the pi just seems cooler than an android phone. Both would be valid reasons in my mind. Also where does one find android phones cheap? Where does one get batteries once the current ones expire?

As far as I see there is nothing wrong with using the tools that you are familiar with, interested in, and have laying around over something that you are not familiar with, have no interest in and would have to go out and purchase.

Ummmm, I'm reminded of Perl's slogan, theres more than one way to do it.

Re:What do they do?

[mlush]

The device itself is the killer app.

This

Consider the project 'I want to open my garage door with my phone' OK easy enough, small computer with web-server CGI app and some wires to hook it up to the door motor....

Prior to the Pi you could buy a low power, cheap, computer with USB, Ethernet, video and sound (and no GPIO) but they cost $150+

So now I had to ask the question this is going to be cool but is it $150 worth of cool\? and I'd be forced to conclude no I've got a perfectly serviceable remote control... $35? and a built in way to access the motor? now were talking

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an alternative, you could consider http://nearlyfreespeech.net .. for that amount of traffic, you could host the site for years with 10$.

Re:What do they do?

[Sigg3.net]

I'd say the killer app is full HD decoding on the chip on 4 Watt/hr usage (from the last 2012 LXF issue). Not sure if it has been reverse-engineered yet, but there's a proprietary media player available.

Re:What do they do?

[RedHat Rocky]

Curious, how does the Pi match up to say a Netgear 300N running custom firmware?

I got my Netgear for about $35 on sale.

Re:What do they do?

[Patch86]

At a glance at the specs- the Pi's ARM chip has double the clock speed of the 300N's MIPS chip, the Pi has 4x the RAM, and the Pi has a Broadcom VideoCore GPU. So on raw computing power, the Pi wins.

Although obviously it depends what you're after. The router has 5 ethernet ports and built in wireless, so it wins there. But then the Pi has HDMI and USB and an audio jack, so it wins there.

The Pi does have two rather clear wins, though. Firstly, its storage (including boot files) is on SD card, making it easy to swap between different OS set ups (hence why I can flit between my sturdy Debian and my retro RISC OS with such ease). Secondly, the Pi has exposed GPIO pins, meaning you can use it as a controller for more or less anything you want.

Re:What do they do?

[Anrego]

It's something I'm passively interested in. I'm sure if I really applied myself or did some searching I could get one, but as it stands I'm waiting until I can just buy one of the damn things like I'd buy anything else.

Any time I check the few that will ship one to Canada (already adding cost to something who's big appeal is being really cheap) I'm greeted with a "notify me when available" link.

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

I also bought several SD cards to swap out but only during the test phase to determine which distro was right for me. I chose against and speak out against openelec primarily due to their bullshit security policy which prohibits installation of other programs while at the same time activating the root account. It also won't recognize my drobobox that I have connected to it. Technically it sees it but reports that it is a huge huge device and then fails to mount the volume. The Raspbmc distro sees my drobobox and works properly with it, though the raspbmc guys made it so that you can't update the files as a regular user even though the shares are set up to allow that. You have to open a file manager window as root to do it (as root on a workstation accessing the shares).

Your way of doing things has brought yet another slew of ideas about how this little device can be used. A low cost print server is a neat idea as I have 4 printers set up near one another that all could be run off that device thus allowing me to turn off one or more computers.

Re:What do they do?

[HermMunster]

An old android cell phone isn't a general purpose device. Thus it has limits that the Pi was designed to eliminate. Please don't buy a Pi because that means there's one more available for the rest of us.

Re:What do they do?

[Pieroxy]

You're not looking very hard. RPis have been in stock for month in the two official retailers.

Of course, if you wait for it to be available on Amazon, well, too bad.

Re:What do they do?

[evilviper]

An old android cell phone isn't a general purpose device. Thus it has limits that the Pi was designed to eliminate.

That's just circular logic, with no basis in fact.

And Android phone is every bit a "general purpose" device by any definition. You don't get root access by default, but that doesn't make it cease to be a "general purpose" computer.

Please don't buy a Pi because that means there's one more available for the rest of us.

No problem there. I haven't yet thought of any purpose where the Pi is a cheaper or better fit than some other easily available commercial device. I'm sure there's SOMETHING out there that it's good at, but I haven't found it, and none of the Pi evangelizers seem to be able to list anything, either.

Re:What do they do?

[evilviper]

Perhaps the learning curve to do this on android is higher than it is on the pi

No, there's existing Android apps that will perform most commonly desired functions, like this one. The learning curve to do this on Android is EXTREMELY low.

Also where does one find android phones cheap? Where does one get batteries once the current ones expire?

Amazon.com sells a brand new Alcatel Lucent for $40 w/free shipping. Personally, I'd look for higher-end phones with cracked screens on eBay, which sell for little more than the cost of shipping.

Amazon.com also sells replacement batteries for many models of cell phones, even less popular ones. But that's not strictly necessary, as you can run a cell phone off of a few rechargeable AAs if you are so inclined.

As far as I see there is nothing wrong with using the tools that you are familiar with, interested in, and have laying around over something that you are not familiar with, have no interest in and would have to go out and purchase.

No, there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make it a practical usage, which is why I chimed-in to say so.

Ummmm, I'm reminded of Perl's slogan, theres more than one way to do it.

Perl is a mess. Probably not the project to idolize or draw life lessons from.

Re:What do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

RS won't ship to Canada as far as I can tell, and Farnell (Newark/element14) says out of stock..

If you'd like to take not being an asshole out for a test drive, why not use your superior internet browsing skills and provide some links?

Re:What do they do?

[Pieroxy]

Let me see... Yes.... RS won't ship to Canada, and when you select Canada in the list of countries it tells you: "For orders to United States or Canada please place your order with Allied Electronics".

Well. There's that.

Let's go now to Allied Electronics: http://www.alliedelec.com/lp/120626raso/ Note that you don't need to know the address, there is a nice link in the message displayed by the RS checkout page.

Guess what? They have it in stock and they ship to Canada. Isn't that wonderful? I liked my test drive, thank you very much. Frankly, it didn't take long.

Re:What do they do?

[Anrego]

Dunno about you guys, but says availability 0 when I go there.. with a note in red saying:

*Please note that due to extreme demand and short supply, the estimated delivery time is uncertain and will likely take several months. We do regret the delay and inconvenience this may cause.

Re:What do they do?

[Pieroxy]

There are 4 available at Farnell at this very moment.

Re:What do they do?

[Anrego]

Doesn't seem to be any more.

This was kinda my origional point. Yes, if I spent all day refreshing pages I could probably get lucky, but I just don't want one that bad. Clearly they are still in short supply, and clearly people are doing just that (refreshing the page and snatching them up as soon as they become available). If I did buy one now, it would probably sit in a box for a few months anyway, so I'll let the guys who really want one get theirs, then when (if ever) they are properly stocked, I'll get one (or probably like 5).

Re:What do they do?

[Pieroxy]

I've been 5 times to these websites during this story. Every one of these 5 times there was some available.

There *may* be a problem, but I clearly don't see it.

What do I do with one?

[NewWorldDan]

I got a Raspberry Pi for xmas. There was a point in my life where this would have been the coolest thing ever, but right now, I'm kind of wondering what to do with it. This is further complicated by the fact that the only HDMI display in the house is the living room TV.

About the only thing I've come up with is maybe putting XBMC on it so I can stream videos off my home server. However, that would require running some network cables to the TV first. Is there a decent WiFi adapter for this thing?

Re:What do I do with one?

[niado]

Is there a decent WiFi adapter for this thing?

There is a list here

Re:What do I do with one?

[uncle slacky]

Some of the various XBMC distros for the Pi have *limited* built-in wifi adapter support.

Personally I just installed XBMC (from a PPA) on top of standard Raspbian (which already supported my USB wifi adapter). As long as your adapter is supported by Debian, you should be OK doing this.

Re:What do I do with one?

[FuzzyDaddy]

I got one, hooked it up to a USB webcam, and set up a cron job to do time lapse photography. There's a utility to stitch together a bunch of stills into video, which you can actually run on the Pi itself.

Re:What do I do with one?

[heckler95]

Adafruit has a great series of lessons on how to get it setup and examples of some interesting uses. They also have a ton of useful accessories, cases, etc.

I've done a few Arduino-like experiments using their Pi Cobbler breakout board. I got mine to output status information (date/time, IP Address, network stats) and/or a twitter feed on a cheap 16x2 LCD display. With a cheap wifi dongle and one of those USB emergency cellphone chargers for power, it's completely independent of wires, so I'm thinking about adding some motors and maybe a few IR sensors to create a basic rover. Once you get the distro setup to auto-login and install TightVNC server and enable SSH, you just need to give it a network connection to control it remotely from a PC. I only hooked mine up to an HDMI TV once on first boot to get those things running. Now I just turn it on and wait for the IP to appear on the LCD display and SSH or VNC into it.

I agree that initially it was tough to come up with useful things to do with it, but the Adafruit tutorials went a long way toward inspiring me and walking me through the more mundane details of taking care of the basics (SSH, VNC, WiFi, etc.) so that you can focus on actually doing something cool with it. You can also search around for BeagleBone or Arduino + Ethernet Shield projects for ideas since the Pi can do most of what those can at a fraction of the price. Good luck!

Re:What do I do with one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Media player seems to be the biggest general use.

I can see them becoming a kind of middle ground between an arduino and a full computer for people who need a bit of logic in their project but don't have the skills (or time to invest) in making their own boards / using something (relatively) lower level like an arduino. The low cost + low power usage means you can throw one of these things in and write your stuff in perl or python or whatever suits you.

Re:What do I do with one?

[MBGMorden]

Just get a wireless bridge and plug it into that. As a benefit, if you get one of those and a switch setup behind your living room TV you'll be able to get anything you want from that area connected to your home LAN without ever having to worry about purchasing separate wireless adapters.

Re:What do I do with one?

[serviscope_minor]

Well, it depends on what things you want to automate, really.

You could plug in any old 802.11b wifi adapter and drive the TV making it an information display of some sort. What do you like displayed? Current train timetable, weather forecast, news?

Rpi + old nokia cellphone and you interact with it via SMS or something. That will even work while the power is out / will draw much less power than leaving your internet connection on when you're out.

Make a time lapse video of something interesting, using an old webcam or controllable camera.

etc?

Re:What do I do with one?

[spire3661]

I use a Tenda $10 wifi adapter and it works great, although SSH drops off a lot faster then wired.

Re:What do I do with one?

[gQuigs]

Lucky :).. I don't have any HDMI displays in the house.

I also got one for xmas. I may try using it as a headless always on server though. Although we are looking at buying a TV now... primarily so I can use my $35 Pi.

Re:What do I do with one?

[spire3661]

No points so i just want to thank you for posting this. Adafruit is really pushing education right now, I have great respect for that woman.

Re:What do I do with one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just received an edimax 150 from newegg...$10 and works perfectly with raspbmc. No external powered hub needed.

Re:What do I do with one?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a $ 1.50 problem. Female DVI to Male HDMI adapter use DVI monitor.

Re:What do I do with one?

[NewWorldDan]

Thanks. I haven't had a computer running Linux in about 10 years. Lots of good helpful responses here.

Re:What do I do with one?

[Grench]

Try using an HDMI-to-DVI cable; if you have a TV or monitor with a DVI input, this should allow your Pi to connect and get you going.

Headless all-in-one works sweet - mine spent about 3 hours connected to my TV, even had a keyboard and mouse - now it's headless. I installed VNC server (so X sessions are possible) and I use SSH to connect to it for command line configuration changes (99% of all interaction between me and the Pi come through a TeraTerm Pro SSH connection). Install Webmin on it too if you like, then you can work on it via a web browser.

Re:What do I do with one?

[samkass]

Amazon sells inexpensive HDMI-to-DVI or RGB cables. I got mine for like $12.

Re:What do I do with one?

[mprindle]

You can get an HDMI to SVGA/DVI/Display port converters for pretty cheap so you can hook it to any monitor you want. I also picked up a 802.11N 2.4Ghz WiFi adapter from AirLink for less than $10. I got both at Amazon.

Re:What do I do with one?

[evilviper]

I got one, hooked it up to a USB webcam, and set up a cron job to do time lapse photography.

An old Android phone would have been cheaper, the pics much higher quality, and I bet there's already an app in the Play Store so setup would have been infinitely quicker and easier. Plus with WiFi and a battery built-in, positioning the phone might have been vastly easier.

Re:What do I do with one?

[chihowa]

Geez, you're really pushing the old Android phone thing pretty hard. Did a raspberry eat your mother or something?

I don't have an old Android phone. What now, o' wise one?

Re:What do I do with one?

[evilviper]

Did a raspberry eat your mother or something?

If someone is trying to say how useful a Raspberry Pi is, it had better be an example where there aren't other products which do the job cheaper, better, and faster all around.

If you are doing it just because you like to experiment or "play", I don't have the slightest objection, as long as you're up-front about it, and don't pretend it's a practical usage case.

I don't have an old Android phone. What now, o' wise one?

A BRAND NEW Alcatel Venture costs under $40, with free shipping, from Amazon.com right NOW. That should be less expensive than a Pi + webcam.

Personally, I'd buy a much higher-end phone with cracked screen off of eBay for little more than the cost of shipping, but I know that option doesn't appeal to everyone...

Re:What do I do with one?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pi has composite output too, the quality isn't as good, but you should be able to at least find a TV that takes composite input to use your Pi with until you get something better.

Re:What do I do with one?

[xQx]

You do know that yellow connector on the side of the raspberry pi is a composite video out don't you? ... Still, it amazes me people have displays without Hdmi, it's been a standard item for more than 5 years.... Are you still all sporting CRT's or something?

Re:What do I do with one?

[rephlex]

Plenty of LCD displays don't have any digital inputs, believe it or not.

Re:What do I do with one?

[HermMunster]

It also has an RCA video out built into the board. You can also get an HDMI to VGA adapter.

Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the primary element is a Raspberry Pie is carbon, they should have named the company Element12.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[LiENUS]

You don't think Silicon is an appropriate element for a technology company?

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

More saddening is that if you google Element 14, the first search entry that appears is www.element14.com (the company) AND NOT a link to element 14 (Silicon) on a periodic table, or to a wikipedia article of the same.

In fact, the entire first page will be about Raspberry Pi, the first link to a periodic table is buried on page 2.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

Element 6 perhaps? Element 12 is magnesium.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Element14 existed long before the Raspberry Pi Foundation...

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't be a problem for people who know how to use Google, though.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the primary element is a Raspberry Pie is carbon, they should have named the company Element12.

Edible raspberries are mostly made of carbon (atomic number 6, ~12 g/mol).
Programmable raspberries are mostly made of silicon (atomic number 14, ~28 g/mol).

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

No, what they should have done is left the name as Farnell instead of embarking on a idiotic and pointless rebranding exercise.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Big Hairy Ian]

I'm sure he was thinking of the isotope.

Re:Element14 is a stupid name

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Edible raspberries are made mostly of Oxygen and Hydrogen. Raspberries are 87% water.

How many have actually shipped?

[Luthair]

Zing! Too soon?

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[gabereiser]

i own 5 of these, 2 first edition Model B's (256m ram) and 3 second edition Model B's (512mb ram)... So yes, they do ship and ship often... The wait time is usually 2-4 weeks if backordered..

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[Anonymous Coward]

i've had 2 Pi's shipped to my place... i dont know how they do it but the damn thing is at my door 24 hours after i press the "Purchase" button ... and im about 1500KM from the state of Georgia (where they originate from). and im in Canada... so in 24 hours that thing gets into 4 flights, passes customs and into a UPS truck right to my door.

simply incredible... so i dont do jokes about their shipping anymore, the logistics are mind boggling.

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[chill]

Who has these in stock for U.S. delivery?

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[gabereiser]

Newark/Element14 does... http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-modb-512m/model-b-assembled-board-only/dp/43W5302 And if it's out of stock, it takes no more than 14-21 days for a backorder to be fulfilled... I always buy mine through them, they are great.

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[Osgeld]

so they dont have them in stock then... its on backorder, which was not the question, you can find plenty of places that have them on backorder

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[drinkypoo]

Not only that but Newark doesn't actually stock them at all, they are shipped from some other warehouse, but they will lie and tell you they have them in stock, then you get a notification that they don't have them in stock, blah blah blah. They're liars and frauds and I won't do business with them again.

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[gabereiser]

I've never had a problem with them and I order from them all the time. Bits and pieces, boards, test equip... But to each their own.

Re:How many have actually shipped?

[drinkypoo]

I've never had a problem with them and I order from them all the time.

They can't handle the load of collecting payment for and directing the shipment of R-Pi units. Imagine what it would be like if they also had to ship all these. They're victims of their own success, obviously, but that doesn't change anything for the buyer right now. And I could forgive all of it except that they claim to have units in stock when they don't stock them at all.

Raspberry Pi = Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

So many uses so little time. I love my Pi, and am planning on buying one or two more.

  It has programmable pins !!! which can be used to switch relay s and control electronics, no weird usb breakout box needed. If you end up frying it, your only out $35 or $25.

It is an amazing video player, pushes 1080p H264&MPEG2, with Dolby digital without a sweat (mpeg2 license cost about $2). Run XMBC on it and you can control it with the TVs remote, The best support of CEC I have ever seen. I am in the process of using mine as a dvr.

It takes only 2 watts to power!! Perfect server for a low traffic website. Cheap to keep running 24/7. Plus its completely solid state so no fan issues, no noise.

True there are other options out there for all of this, but none of them have the wealth of documentation, or community support that the Pi has.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Anonymous Coward]

AppleTV, like RPi has arm processor, GPU, ehternet and USB. Unlike RPi it also has a case and PSU. It only costs $100. Now all they need to do is open it up to apps.

Turn over the business to McDonalds

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Then billions and billions of pi's would be sold.

Re:Turn over the business to McDonalds

[BasilBrush]

Downside: The McDonalds Raspberry Pi would run too hot.

Upside: You could sue them!

Re:Turn over the business to McDonalds

[Riddler Sensei]

But then they'll run super hot and frequently fall into your lap.

High Demand, short supply

[Striikerr]

A Raspberry Pi was on my son's Christmas list for 2012 and they were sold out from the primary vendors. Instead I had to buy one from an Amazon Marketplace seller at 2x the cost. Some folks made some good money by buying them up and reselling them with a 100% markup. I don't begrudge them, I paid my money and got it for my son, along with all of the other components needed to make good use of it. It's an amazing piece of kit for anyone who wants to play around with it. As mentioned, it's cheap and can be used in a variety of ways. People are very creative and I can't wait to see what they do with these..

Re:High Demand, short supply

[Lumpy]

MCM electronics had them in stock from Nov24 to today.. did you really look at all the vendors? 4 days before christmas I bought 2 of them.

URL

[Frankie70]

. If the site holds up after a year, ill move the domain over to his house server and save $140/year

Can you post the URL of your F-I-L's website?

Re:URL

[spire3661]

I would rather not, sorry. I havent done any security review at all, yet. Its a simple static site with several pages, HTML only, nothing dynamic at all. IM using lighttpd as the webserver.

Re:URL

[Anonymous Coward]

Here.

Re:URL

[Anonymous Coward]

. If the site holds up after a year, ill move the domain over to his house server and save $140/year

Can you post the URL of your F-I-L's website?

If he's a psychologist with a lucrative client base, my guess would be this one.

Re:URL

[Pieroxy]

No! Stop it! You're going to slashdot slashdot !

Re:URL

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Don't worry - we'll do the security review for you!

The sky's the limit, except for USB

[Anonymous Coward]

The Raspberry Pi doesn't need a killer app. It's a general purpose computer, so you can do pretty much anything you want with it, up to a point.

The main problem with the Raspberry Pi is that it has an extremely limited USB controller within its Broadcom BCM2835 device hardware. It's so limited that many applications requiring USB simply fail to work at all. When it fails, the entire USB chain and the networking system collapses.

Unfortunately this problem is not something that can be fixed any time soon, if ever. The BCM2835 was never designed to be used this way, so by selecting this particular Broadcom chip the Raspberry Pi was effectively designed with a built-in hardware fault.

Does this mean it's useless? Absolutely not! If your application can stay clear of the USB issues, you have a very nice little ARM board for next to no money. Test it first and you'll be fine. If your USB and networking collapses, well, you only lost $35, and you can still use it for something less demanding of USB.

Re:The sky's the limit, except for USB

[Pieroxy]

Are you sure your power supply is powerful enough?

As a music server

[PhrostyMcByte]

For me, I've got a Raspberry Pi hooked up to an ODAC/O2 (audiophile DAC/amp) in a comfortable location for listening to music with headphones. Connected to Wifi, it reads the music from a NAS in another room and runs a mpd server controlled by my phone or tablet.

It's really nice to have a noiseless, compact music server that can be hidden away rather easily.

Re:As a music server

[NewWorldDan]

Good idea. I've got a whole house sound system that's not really being utilized. Right now, I just plug in my cell phone and use that as a music server. Thanks.

Re:As a music server

[Anonymous Coward]

Any tips for getting USB audio out working? I've started researching before buying a DAC and it looks like a lot of people are having difficulty with this.

Re:As a music server

[PhrostyMcByte]

The ODAC implements the UAC1 (USB Audio Class 1) interface and works without any drivers on all major OSes. Great pains were taken to maintain this property -- many higher-end DACs require a proprietary driver or use UAC2 which isn't supported everywhere.

For me it Just Worked (tm) on the Pi. Highly recommend it!

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Anonymous Coward]

AppleTV doesn't have a chipset to host USB clients... That's the end of it. You can't add any USB devices to it.
Also, the Pi is all about those beautiful GPIO pins you can work magic with..

Agreed - not enough functionality in AppleTV.

[Andy Prough]

Even a jailbroken AppleTV appears to do little more than work as an XBMC streaming device. Raspberry Pi has so many more applications - it's a general computing device.

Re:Agreed - not enough functionality in AppleTV.

[BasilBrush]

And that's great. For people who want to tinker about creating or adapting programs for a hobby, the RPi seems like a great, simpl(ish) and cheap way.

Personally I got a lot of enjoyment from programming the Propeller based Hydra board a few years ago. I'm sure a lot more fun than I'd have with the RPi, but that's a taste based thing. And the Hydra costs about 6 times the price.

Why do people that don't like Apple bitch when Apple doesn't serve a particular market?

Maybe one day Apple TV will have apps. But it's still not the same market. Such apps will be commercial apps available from the App Store. It'd compete with consoles and set top boxes. It won't ever be a device intended for hobby coders.

Re:Agreed - not enough functionality in AppleTV.

[bigtrike]

I can second this. I only use my AppleTV for Plex (an XBMC fork) and sometimes Netflix. The rest of the content channels are useless to me. I'm debating buying one or more raspberry Pis for applications that won't have them hooked up to a TV.

"A least"?

[Rogerborg]

Time to debug those very small shell scripts that you used to replace the "editors".

too bad they fucked up the layout of I/O

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the layout of input/output will be rethinked for version 2.
Why the hell where the IO ports splitted all around the faces ?
You can't seal it in a wall and/or cases are harder to design.

hdmi should be with rca + audio on the same (main) side (with USB).
leds should be closer of the side...

Re:too bad they fucked up the layout of I/O

[Lumpy]

"You can't seal it in a wall"

Why? I can seal them in the wall just fine.

Re:too bad they fucked up the layout of I/O

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because they wanted to keep board area and layers to a minimum in order to reduce cost. You try to route a board like this and see how easy it is to place connectors where you want them.

Re:too bad they fucked up the layout of I/O

[Anonymous Coward]

and which side do you choose as front side ?

A million techies capable of Linux development?

[Anonymous Coward]

...or is there some other way to interpret this?

I'd like to think that there are this many highly qualified techies
who are capable of working with RPi, but experience makes me
have some doubts.

Sold vs. Shipped

[Anonymous Coward]

Sold and shipped are two very different things.

Isn't that right, RS Components???

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/391521/20121005/rs-components-raspberry-pi-raspi-allied-customer.htm

Re:Sold vs. Shipped

[Anonymous Coward]

Second this. Won't ever buy from or recommend RS Components again:

- Registered to order first week of May 2012.

- Actually got to order last week of June 2012.

- Order was finally received on the last day of October 2012.

Slashdot effect

[Anonymous Coward]

It flew over your head.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Andy Prough]

No, you can mount a lot of USB storage devices to an RPi ( http://raspi.tv/2012/how-to-mount-and-use-a-usb-hard-disk-with-the-raspberry-pi), not so with an AppleTV ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4054508?start=0&tstart=0).

But still no.....

[Lumpy]

A board. I need a rasberry Pi A. I also want a higher horsepower version.. I have been using the A13 based olimex boards that overclock to 1.6ghz nicely (1.8 if you add a heatsink) to do a LOT more than the RasPi's do for higher power projects.

Anyone using this as a MythTV frontend?

[jbr439]

I see people successfully using Raspberry Pi as a xbmc box. I'm wondering if anyone is using it as a MythTV frontend?

Re:Anyone using this as a MythTV frontend?

[Anonymous Coward]

MythFrontend itself is too heavy, but you can use RaspBMC or OpenElec to get similar functionality via XBMC

Re:Anyone using this as a MythTV frontend?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - it works but with a large list of recordings does take a while to list.

Openelec R.C.

One thing you've got to like about Apple.

[Andy Prough]

They use basic Unix, and they don't go police-state crazy when someone comes up with a jailbreak. And the hardware is pretty nice. But, there's a lot of differences between the complete openness and wide functionality of the RPi, and the closed system, higher price, and lesser functionality of the AppleTV device.

Cubieboard

[MSG]

Funny thing, I ordered a cubieboard this morning before this story was posted:
http://cubieboard.org/

Two of my roommates have RPis. One of them has two of them. I watched them both struggle with the RPi units when they were first setting them up. Those things are god awful. Graphics requires a binary blob, and the USB power source causes a lot of stability problems. Since the Ethernet is attached by USB, this normally manifests by the Ethernet dropping off, the kernel spewing messages about it, and the whole system reduced to a grinding mess as syslogd tries to write all that noise to the SD card. Running off of USB power is just ridiculous.

The cubieboard is 2x as fast, has 2-4x the memory, a SATA port, and Ethernet on the SoC rather than via USB. And, since it doesn't power off of a USB port I expect it to be a lot more stable. Most importantly to me: it doesn't require a binary blob for standard graphics.

Re:Cubieboard

[rephlex]

Running off of USB power is just ridiculous.

Not really. The way the Raspberry Pi uses USB power is flawed though. The power supply connected to the Pi's Micro-USB connector is merely passed through to USB devices when it should be regenerated instead. Doing this would improve reliability with power supplies that output lower than USB spec voltage, i.e. less than 4.75 volts.

Re:Cubieboard

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a firmware image for the GPU. That could be on ROM if cost wasn't a concern and the effective difference to its programmability would be zero, since you don't know how the GPU works internally. But it would hide the binary blob from people who don't care about programmability but only have a hatred for the, er, binary format.

As for programmability, which is what actually matters, Mali 400 has no open source driver except some reverse-engineered garbage. The GPU on the Pi does, and it's code from the manufacturer.

Finally, cubieboard is 2x the cost. Newsflash: spend more, get more.

Your perception that one socket for power is better than another is ridiculous, BTW. A USB wall wart is no different to a wall wart with some 1.3mm connector. Sounds like they were trying to power it off a computer's USB, which is going to give current draw issues, and is not the intent of the design.

Re:Cubieboard

[rephlex]

As for programmability, which is what actually matters, Mali 400 has no open source driver except some reverse-engineered garbage. The GPU on the Pi does, and it's code from the manufacturer.

No it doesn't, they just made the source of a message passing interface available, i.e. it's just a shim, not an actual driver. See here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 and http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxNDk

Re:Cubieboard

[rephlex]

Your perception that one socket for power is better than another is ridiculous, BTW. A USB wall wart is no different to a wall wart with some 1.3mm connector.

I don't think he was referring to the physical design, rather to the very real issues regarding USB power. My argument is that if the Raspberry Pi was competently designed these issues would be much less of a problem than they are.

Re:Cubieboard

[MSG]

It would make the system more reliable, yet. Not reliable, though. If you connect a USB device to the Pi that draws the maximum amount of power provided by the USB power input on the Pi, the two devices are still going to need more than is being input. Capacitors can take care of short bursts, but it's still possible to need more energy than is available, at which point the system will fail. Usually that'll mean a USB attached device will go offline, and some don't recover well. As we've seen, that's usually the Ethernet port, and you have to reset the Pi to fix the problem. It's gross.

Re:Cubieboard

[MSG]

Finally, cubieboard is 2x the cost. Newsflash: spend more, get more.

It's not 2x, it's less than 50% more expensive. +$14 on top of $35. For reliability, it's worth the extra cost. But it's not just reliability, it's also has useful interfaces that aren't present on the Pi, like SATA. SATA is worth the extra cost. But it's not jut reliability and SATA, it's also a whole lot faster and generally more capable. It's also a more open SoC.

Your perception that one socket for power is better than another is ridiculous, BTW

As another user suggested, it's not the form factor, is the available current. A USB wall wart is still going to be designed to conform to USB draw limitations. That means that a USB device attached to a Pi is capable of drawing as much power as the wart is designed to provide. That USB device + Pi are capable of drawing more.

Vehicle management system.

[MachineShedFred]

I'm using one to build a vehicle management system for my rock crawler project. The platform is a 2nd generation Toyota 4Runner, which has a double-din dash opening that currently houses a broken CD player / tape deck combo.

It will house a 7" touchscreen display driven by the RPi, which will accept bluetooth A2DP audio (already have that working) and forward it to an amplifier, use a 3-axis gyro / accelerometer module to give vehicle positional and attitude data represented as a gimbaled graphic on the display, offline GPS navigation, and a "digital switchboard" for vehicle accessories like differential lockers, on-board air compressor, lights, etc. through an electrical relay control module.

Way more functional than your average in-dash navigation touchscreen thing from the car audio manufacturers, at half the price.

Re:Vehicle management system.

[HermMunster]

My buddy is always trying to build the cheapest most flexible and powerful car computer he can. This would seem to be a good solution for him. Even if it is just a project always in the works he could learn a lot. I'm thinking about doing something similar just to work the project. That just got me wondering whether I could run that off my truck's stereo USB ports.

Re:Vehicle management system.

[MachineShedFred]

It's a matter of amperage. You can find 12v to 5v down-step voltage converters for really cheap (like $2-$3) that would work - get a "speed charger" for a smartphone that plugs into what used to be called a cigarette lighter and strip the plastics off of it and wire it off of something like the change tray light that only works if the ignition is on. Those "speed chargers" usually offer up 1A of current at 5v - perfect for the RPi and 1-2 things plugged into it. And, they are usually cheaper than building your own without even factoring in the time to design it, order parts, solder together, etc.

Existing USB ports may only offer about 500mA of current, which isn't enough to properly power a Raspberry Pi. Something off of a car stereo that is meant for using with a flash-based storage device in read-only mode may be even less, like 250mA, which is a third of what you need.

How can they not know?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Foundation receives a royalty for every Pi manufactured.

Have they received SO MUCH cash that its just lying around in bundles?

Re:How can they not know?

[SourceFrog]

Are you serious? Or trolling? Distributors purchase in bulk, but you don't get instant real-time-updating retail orders information from the distributors. Even the fucking article explains it:

"They're only one of two official distributors; we don't have completely up-to-date figures from RS Components yet, but Farnell's news suggests that we're well on the way to having sold our millionth Raspberry Pi" the foundation added further

Running my PI as an Asterisk PBX

[mprindle]

Got my PI Monday and got it setup with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 3 beta. The site raspberry-asterisk.org has a prebuilt image and from there you can easily update to the latest versions. This is going to be mainly for testing/playing at home, but I may deploy one to setup a small 4 DID/10 extenstion FreePBX install to supplement an old POTS pbx.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[kelemvor4]

AppleTV, like RPi has arm processor, GPU, ehternet and USB. Unlike RPi it also has a case and PSU. It only costs $100. Now all they need to do is open it up to apps.

That sounds about right. 400% more expensive, fancy casing, apple logo, more limited functionality than the competition. They'll sell millions most likely.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Obfuscant]

That sounds about right. 400% more expensive,

$35 compared to $100 is "400% more"? Try 200% more. Or three times the price. But with a case and a power supply. And a "disk" of some kind already installed. So, $10 for a case, $5 for a USB charger/PS, $12 for a 8Gb class 10 SD card, you're up to 62$. That cuts your excess price down to 50%. Then consider that you'll probably have someone to call when it doesn't work ...

And, I assume, a better layout so you don't have things sticking out all sides, like the power and SD card on one end, the USB and net connections on the other, the HDMI on a third side, and the audio and composite video the fourth.

And, I hope, a failure rate that does not approach that of the Rpi. Out of six I already have, one simply throws up its hands and loses all USB-based connectivity after running for a minute or two (sometimes less), which means no USB devices or network connection. Of the two model 2's I bought (with the extra GPIO in place of resistors), both had most of the extra GPIO holes (where you'd want to install connectors) pre-filled with solder.

Don't get me wrong. These are wonderful devices at a great price. A price where I consider them basically throw-away if they don't work. I'm going to be putting one at the remote end of a gigabit ethernet link to control some cameras that need serial commands to turn them on, and I'll have one running in the Winlink messaging system as a replacement for an old Windows clunker. I'll eventually package one up with Xbian as a home media device, maybe.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Andy Prough]

But can you control the relay of the serial commands to the cameras with the AppleTV device? Or use it to take over the Windows PC in your Winlink system? We're talking about wide functionality here rather than price, and I just don't see the AppleTV device, even when jailbroken, as a general computing replacement for an RPi.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Obfuscant]

But can you control the relay of the serial commands to the cameras with the AppleTV device? Or use it to take over the Windows PC in your Winlink system?

Dunno. Not going to bother trying.

We're talking about wide functionality here rather than price,

No, actually, the specific part of the original statement I was replying to, which I quoted in my reply, was only about price. Once you figure in the extra stuff you get with AppleTV, and correct the original failure at simple math, the prices don't seem that outrageous after all.

Minix

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idea whether Minix has been ported to the Raspberry Pi?

Re:Minix

[Anonymous Coward]

Not yet, but the 2 people in the world that care about Minix are seriously considering it.

USB problems not related to power

[Anonymous Coward]

The USB fault has nothing to do with power (that's a separate issue, and not really a RasPi fault). It occurs even when all the power to devices is supplied by an externally powered USB hub. In fact it is even more common under those conditions, because USB hubs add USB endpoints to the chain.

The problem is related to the total number of endpoints in the USB chain, the USB polling and interrupts, and also the bus split transaction response times, which need to be under 1 ms or else they fail and the USB events are lost. As a result, when the ARM processor is busy doing something else, it cannot provide a realtime response and USB data is often lost.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has described the fault mechanism on the forum. It's a deep-seated hardware problem. There is no solution currently available, and there probably never will be.

Re:USB problems not related to power

[HermMunster]

At this point I have a Drobobox, an external USB CD/DVD writer and my mouse connected to one powered 5v 2.6a hub. I have a G15 keyboard and the hub connected to the USB ports on the Pi.

I've had it a bit more complex in that I had taken a PC case fan and spliced it to a USB cable and had that plugged into the hub as well. On top of that I had an ATI RF USB adapter plugged into either the keyboard or the hub. All of this without any adverse or abnormal behavior. I do have my Pi overclocked and the voltage upped (which likely has nothing to do with the power supplied to the USB ports, but likely does impact the ability of the CPU to provide a realtime response).

In my case I rarely am in front of the keyboard or using the mouse as I use XBMC and hence use the remote control software on my Android devices. I also SSH in most of the time to do various tasks such as install new software, compile programs, etc. Amazingly while compiling programs and playing a HD video on the TV the Pi didn't balk once.

There's documentation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I looked, the web site just wanted to tell me "it's cool, we promise" but didn't want to give any details about how exactly to use those I/O pins or what exactly they are capable of. (i.e., just input or output, or can they be put in either mode, and can they do analog I/O as well as digital I/O?)

If you found some documentation, I'd love to know where it is. Without it, there's no way in hell I'm buying one. (...but then I doubt I'll buy it even with documentation. The I/O would have to be damn impressive to beat what I can do with an AT89S52 that I can get for $1.50, and if it isn't that good, then there's little point -- I can already use up all the I/O capabilities of the AT89S52 even with it's measly amount of CPU and RAM. Tossing more CPU and RAM behind lesser I/O capabilities ain't going to do me a damn bit of good, especially when it costs far more.)

Re:There's documentation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Datasheet: http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf

More: http://elinux.org/RPi_Documentation

You didn't try very hard, did you? The datasheet has been available for almost a year.

Re:There's documentation?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but just how hard should I have to look?

Any electronics web site has these things out in the open, linked directly from any page that mentions anything about the product. How far did you have to dig to find that? Because I spent a few minutes looking and couldn't find shit, vs. the no time at all I spend looking for datasheets on more useful components.

As for what you found, it isn't what I asked for. A datasheet for the chips the Pi uses is not a datasheet for the Pi. The second link isn't even on the Pi web site, which kind of confirms what I've said about the Pi web site lacking documentation.

Just how much trouble should I have to go through to use a device that gives me just a dozen I/O pins?

Simple fact is the Pi is nothing but a bare-bones Linux PC which uses the "electronics hobbyist" excuse for not including a case, power supply, storage media, or various other things that will double its cost as you attempt to turn it into a minimalist Linux PC. If they were serious about the idea of it being a computer for electronics hobbyists, it would have included an I/O bus to attach multiple peripherals to, at a minimum. This "just enough pins to make some LEDs blink" stuff is a joke.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

Your statement is totally false. Just a big lie.

The Pi's 2 USB ports are standard USB that you would find on any personal computer.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

This is also incorrect. Because one distro that has customized their kernel that doesn't include the ability to mount some USB devices doesn't mean that any other kernel can't do that with ease.

OpenElec won't mount my Drobobox but Raspbmc does. So do a number of other distros.

Don't fall for some article where the author doesn't understand how Linux and the various distributions work.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

He's talking about the $25.00 model which would make it 4x the cost.

There's no reason to debate that.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[amorsen]

The Pi's 2 USB ports are standard USB that you would find on any personal computer.

Except most devices you would want to use with a Raspberry Pi don't actually work. The ports themselves are fine. The USB controller is a joke.

Well all right, the ports themselves aren't actually fine, there are lots of problems with how they deliver power (or fail to) and hot plugging has issues as well.

They have the same general shape as a standard USB that you would find on any personal computer, I'll give you that.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Obfuscant]

He's talking about the $25.00 model which would make it 4x the cost.

I've never seen the $25 model anywhere for sale, and even at that price, 4 times the cost is only 300% more, not 400% more. Add in the things the AppleTV comes with that the $25 Pi doesn't and you're back to maybe twice as much (or just 100% more).

There's no reason to debate that.

If that was what had been written, yes, it is still wrong, so yes, there is a reason to debate it. Considering it isn't what was said ...

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

I think just about everything you said is false. Couldn't help laughing as I read it.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

Doesn't change the fact that there is a model and it is $25.00.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[xQx]

Yeah, so, you couldnt be more wrong.

Yes, they were limited in power output in earlier board releases, but all problems were solved by plugging in a powered USB hub.

Spread your misinformation elsewhere.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Andy Prough]

My point is that the device itself is capable of mounting a number of USB hard drives. Whether or not the software will support it is a different story, of course.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[amorsen]

The power issue is a minor problem. The terminally broken USB controller is not.

If the Raspberry Pi had been a product marketed by a regular company, the class action suits would have started already.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[Anonymous Coward]

It also has WiFi, and it's open to apps via being an external display for any iOS app that can detect it.

Low power and silent

[Anonymous Coward]

With the fact that is runs on low power and is silent I have it running 24/7 hanging off my ADSL router.

Currently I have:
*transmission daemon on it with the web UI to download torrents with samba to transfer the downloads
*lighttpd to share small files over the web.
*screen or tmux allowing me to ssh from anywhere and resume my terminal sessions, usually running irssi (irc client), scripting in vi, some long running nethack game, etc.

It's headless andI I don't even need to run X.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

The USB port is not broken. It works fine with everything that I have thrown at it. If anything it is the amount of power available to the devices that you plug in. This is common on all PCs.

Spelling and grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the people posting these stories please learn to f*cking spell, and have some vague idea of grammar.
That is all.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[amorsen]

Go read the forums then. The USB controller is unfixable; it simply cannot work correctly as a host controller. It can get by with retransmissions when it comes to bulk transfers, that "only" costs performance (except when it doesn't, notice all the issues with serial port adapters running all of 115kbps). Isochronous transfers cannot resend, so they will never work.

The USB controller was meant to be used in device mode, not in host mode. Notice that the vendor that provided the USB controller "intellectual property" has functional USB host controllers available, but the Raspberry Pi people were not aware that there was a difference. Now they are stuck with broken silicon for the foreseeable future.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[HermMunster]

I have read the article that you reference. It is not a problem unless you overload the chain and even then it isn't because of the USB chip it's because of the CPU.

Re:Its called AppleTV

[amorsen]

I didn't reference an article. Try the forum threads "USB - the elephant in our room" and "USB redux". Of course they only cover what the Raspberry foundation allows people to write on their forum.