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The Raspberry Pi Turns One

Posted by timothy on from the leap-year-birth-means-it's-only-point-two-five dept.

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."

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Fascinating! And congratulations by demon+driver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re: Obsolete Processor by Kingston · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Here is something surprising I read on the Raspberry PI blog yesterday, according to a Broadcom engineer called Dom Cobley, talking about Eben Upton the originator of the Raspberry Pi project:

    "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.

  3. The aboslute best thing about the Pi... by CaptainOfSpray · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  4. I bought a couple... by MMC+Monster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :-)

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