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Raspberry Pi Hits the 2 Million Mark
The Raspberry Pi project that we've been fans of for quite a while now has hit a new milestone: Today, they announced that as of the last week in October, the project has sold more than two million boards. Raspberry Pi is anything but alone in the tiny, hackable computer world (all kinds of other options, from Arduino to the x86-based Minnowboard, are out there, and all have their selling points), but the low price, open-source emphasis, and focus on education have all helped the Pi catch on. If yours is one of these 2 million, what are you using it for? (And if you favor some other small system for your own experiments, what factors matter?)
Then you may want to take a look at BeagleBone Black. Costs $10 more but uses a much more modern and powerful chip.
Many people won't care what the CPU is. I thought about getting one and I know I don't care. It's cheap and flexible, has decent enough interfaces, has a huge community, and many people who will be coding on it will be writing Python anyway. I had a problem in mind and needed a small programmable device to solve it. I think many people will approach the pi this way rather than from a spec sheet perspective. I.e. "what can I do with this" vs. "what's it made from".
I wanted to build a fun little project over the summer to scare cats out of the garden.
The RPi was a great platform to work with for a casual project like this. Having the GPIO was a real winner here.
I wrote it all up for others to peruse and have offered enough information that anyone could build it for themselves.
http://norris.org.au/cattack/
There are *quirks* to this hardware, but it is not a commercial device, it is for education use. I was telling my teacher-in-training friend that I don't know if I'd want to use the RPi in class with 30 students all finding the quirks at different times: it would be chaos! But for a single enthusiastic student working through these problems will give them a fantastic introduction to troubleshooting and the real life pain that comes with getting something to work.
You. Still. Don't. Get IT!
It is not about the power! You have a cheap ass device that has a massive community that have solved almost all the bugs in the thing so any problem you have is a google search away. The foundation pays for ports of software to it. When you buy a new peripheral you can find quickly if it works with the pi and how to make it work. You can find lots of different enclosures and almost any other wacky thing you can think about.
Also...All modern GPU have binary blobs. On pcs, on phones, on tablets, on embedded. Get over it.
I have a few different arm boards including two raspberry pi boards. Power consumption / power efficiency is NOT a selling point of the pi, if comparing to other arm boards. The pi has no low power states, it is full power all the time. The pi also uses linear voltage regulators, so very inefficient.
My original model panda board has 1G ram, is several times faster than the pi, and uses half the power most of the time, and has the same peak power.
My odroid U2 is at least 10 times faster than the pi, has 2G ram, and uses about the same power (or a little less) most of the time (but it has crazy high peak power if running at 100%cpu with a massive heatsink). If you pull the heatsink, it thermal throttles to still way faster than a pi, and keeps the peak power consumption pretty close to the pi.
I don't have a beagle bone black, but I would suspect it is lower power consumption than a pi.
The selling point for the pi is the community around it is _much_ larger than any of these other SBCs.
There are other hardware RNGs available, but none as inexpensive as a PI. Also because the PI has an RJ45 connection, it can be plugged into my router where it can serve random numbers for all computers on my lan.
While TI documents most of the am3359 SOC it does not provide any documentation for the Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPU core which is proprietary. To the OP, as far as I know there are no non-proprietary GPUs (more or less beefy) on any ARM SOC so good luck on finding one without binary blobs.