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The Raspberry Pi Turns One
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday. Raspberry Pi was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year, with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; a 512 MB RAM upgrade; the launch of a Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of the Minecraft Pocket Edition."
"Cheap" was a higher priority for the project than "powerful" or "up-to-date". For its intended use, and many secondary uses, it's perfectly adequate.
I've seen so many stories about it here on Slashdot, it's hard to believe it's only a year. Feels like a decade.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's not an obsolete processor. It's a SoC designed for a VERY specific use case - a media player.
It's got a top-notch GPU with video decode and 3D graphics (VideoCore 4), making it ideal for media playback. Broadcom threw a lowly ARM core there to handle thee UI and other tasks (like the care and feeding of the VC4 - from network, USB, or other sources of media). For that, you don't need a high end processor, but by integrating the two, a media player only needs a single chip solution that's cheap. No need to add an external processor that would probably be overpowered for the purpose, then need to handle multiple power rails and memory and other things.
It's a very purpose build ASIC. That's why it's cheap - it was designed for a media player that costs $99 retail like a Roku or AppleTV or other media box. It's got a powerful GPU to handle the video, and a lightweight ARM to handle UI, and feeding the media to the GPU.
It's also why it can be a dog-slow processor that can still do impressive graphics at 1080p or play video at 1080p.
Some of these days I'll probably get one just for fun...
Now that the Raspberry Pi even has its own "Raspbmc" XBMC distribution, I could just as well have used one for my living-room audio/video needs instead of the cheap netbook I bought. (Which was no bad choice either, although driver issues forced me to use Windows instead of Linux, which otherwise would have been just perfect.)
What makes it so fascinating: it's extremely cheap, it's a great gadget for learning and experimenting with hard- and software, and at the same time it's powerful enough to be employed for quite some serious real-world computing tasks.
And by the way, in a world that is being choked to death by an economic system based on profit maximization, forcing more and more people to tighten their belts even in the rich industrialized regions while the objective requirements for universal affluence and well-being, i.e. resources, productivity and workforce, have never been available in such an abundance, inventions like the Raspberry Pi will probably become more and more important for people.
"The ARM was snuck into 2835 as a bit of skunkworks from Eben, who had these wild ideas about the general public being able to buy a breakout board for our chip and program it themselves. Sounded great to me, but far-fetched."
You are right about the chip, the Roku 2 media players all use the Broadcom BCM2835.
is the general purpose I/O pins that enable you to read, write, or drive many sorts of real-world device (thermometers, pressure gauges, GPS, servos, motors, etc etc). This feature, in a device that can talk to the internet, opens up a world of possibilities. So the flow of creativity around the Pi from people of all ages and walks of life is just awe-inspiring.
So don't see the Pi as just another computer like your desktop or your laptop.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I bought a couple just to play around with on the home network.
I am using one as an XBMC player in the kids room. It works fine, no problems. Surprising, considering how underpowered it is compared to the Atom-based computers I'm using elsewhere to run XBMC.
The other I am using as a fileserver. It's not set up in a RAID, but it gets quite good performance. So good, in fact, that I am using it for daily use to serve media throughout the house instead of the Netgear ReadyNas Duo that I originally bought for the job. (The Raspberry Pi has better throughput on both reads and writes when using ssh protocol. It also supports hard drives over 2TB.)
As a plus, I'm now completely comfortable dealing with a headless system. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
One is a dedicated NTP (Network Time Protocol) server, with an attached GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver (Trimble Resolution T). The receiver puts a PPS (Pulse Per Second) on a GPIO (General Purpose In Out) pin. Using out-of-the-box NTP software, it is aligned to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) with an offset of less than 1 microsecond. I had the GPS receiver in a much busier computer, but there was too much fluctuation, so the accuracy wasn't as good. In particular, the other box did CPU stepping, which is bad for for this sort of thing.
The other Raspberry PI is also a single purpose appliance (for now). Using some of the features of pulseaudio, I stream music via multicast and RTP (Real Time Protocol). A Raspberry PI is hooked up to some active speakers (via a USB soundcard). The Raspberry sits around listening for the multicast, and plays what it gets. I did it this way, using pulseaudio multicast, so that all the music players in the house are in sync (as far as my hearing can tell).
From my point of view, what makes the Raspberry PI attractive is that it is reasonably inexpensive, reasonably power frugal, reasonably well documented, and has strong support. All this makes it pretty much ideal when turning a general purpose computer into an appliance, with the possibility of changing its use in the future, or adding uses.
Best wishes,
Bob
A 486 is 32 bit.