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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."
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.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You know Jobs must have left detailed plans for it.
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?
Since the primary element is a Raspberry Pie is carbon, they should have named the company Element12.
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..)
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.
Time to offend someone
Zing! Too soon?
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
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.
Good-bye
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
Good-bye
Mine is controlling the heating system in my house using FHEM. It replaces an old notebook which was previously doing the same job.
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.
Then billions and billions of pi's would be sold.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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..
Can you post the URL of your F-I-L's website?
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.
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.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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..
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.
If it's for his practice, can't he just write it off?
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.
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.
Time to debug those very small shell scripts that you used to replace the "editors".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
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.
E pluribus unum
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).
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"You can't seal it in a wall"
Why? I can seal them in the wall just fine.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
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.
FYI, class 10 can actually be slower than class 8 for certain applications
I see people successfully using Raspberry Pi as a xbmc box. I'm wondering if anyone is using it as a MythTV frontend?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Good-bye
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.
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.
Time to offend someone
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.
I've never quite understood this... Expenses are expenses, aren't they?
+1 Disagree
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.
The way you phrase that question sounds like you don't want to hear an answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
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.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
My other UID is three digits.
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.
Move him over to a shared hosting plan for $12-15 a year. Many providers have plans in that price range.
Hosting and Domain name coupons
They're still expenses. But you can think of them as being discounted by your marginal tax rate.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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!
+1 Disagree
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
He's talking about the $25.00 model which would make it 4x the cost.
There's no reason to debate that.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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 ...
I think just about everything you said is false. Couldn't help laughing as I read it.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Doesn't change the fact that there is a model and it is $25.00.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Fair enough.. Buy it is a complete package that does the job pretty well. Just a suggestion for those not planning on much tinkering...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The device itself is the killer app.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
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.
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.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
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
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.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Curious, how does the Pi match up to say a Netgear 300N running custom firmware?
I got my Netgear for about $35 on sale.
Anything is possible given time and money.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
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.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
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.
Perl is a mess. Probably not the project to idolize or draw life lessons from.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.
There are 4 available at Farnell at this very moment.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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).
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.
Write boring code, not shiny code!