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New Raspberry Pi Model B+
mikejuk writes The Raspberry Pi foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi B+. The basic specs haven't changed much — same BC2835 and 512MB of RAM and the $35 price tag. There are now four USB ports, which means you don't need a hub to work with a mouse, keyboard and WiFi dongle. The GPIO has been expanded to 40 pins, but don't worry: you can plug your old boards and cables into the lefthand part of the connector, and it's backward compatible. As well as some additional general purpose lines, there are two designated for use with I2C EEPROM. When the Pi boots it will look for custom EEPROMs on these lines and optionally use them to load Linux drivers or setup expansion boards. Expansion boards can now include identity chips that when the board is connected configures the Pi to make use of them — no more manual customization. The change to a micro SD socket is nice, unless you happen to have lots of spare full size SD cards around. It is also claimed that the power requirements have dropped by half, to one watt, which brings the model B into the same power consumption area as the model A. Comp video is now available on the audio jack, and the audio quality has been improved. One big step for Raspberry Pi is that it now has four holes for mounting in standard enclosures.
The model B has a lot more thought into the board layout. Having the power, and HDMI all on the same side of the board and the optional I/O also all on one other side, makes so much more sense and will allow much cleaner looking enclosures. Although.. I still wish they had done even MORE thought and out the I/O on the OPPOSITE side of the board where they have all the GPIO pins.
Like the move to micro-SD, always ended up using full-size SD adapters that just protruded needlessly from the side. I had one device damaged thanks to the SD adapter being knocked, damaging the board, and I know this has happened to many others.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
http://makezine.com/projects/m...
did i read about this here a few weeks ago?
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Perhaps you're expecting it to do too much? Unless you have very modest needs, it isn't intended to be a desktop/laptop replacement.
Last I checked there was no RTC (Real Time Clock). Don't see any mention of timer chips?
you could add the Wolfson Audio Card to the Pi and get all the audio support you could need from a pi
http://www.adafruit.com/produc...
Glad to see it finally has mounting holes! With a board mounted on top of the Pi, it was a pain to find an enclosure that would work for my projects.
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
Those aren't the "major" shortcomings, and frankly, those aren't shortcomings at all. The CPU is about as fast as you'd expect at that little power consumption, and there is plenty of RAM. No idea what you're trying to do with yours, running Windows on it?
In case you case, the two major shortcomings are power related (try to hotplug a wifi dongle, say) and the non-dedicated ethernet.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Slashdot questions here: Has anyone on slashdot made an effects processor yet?
I've been toying with the idea of making a RPi based Effects processor. I primarily play guitar but am not going to differentiate between it and any other sound application. I've looked around and found 2 projects, one was "Guitar extended" http://guitarextended.wordpres... Which, I'm afraid, is a bit too "We're going to change guitar forever!" for me. I don't want to make yet another crazy sounding thing that no-one wants to listen to, that requires an insane peddle board to control. After I get some decent DSP reverb, gates etc... going, then I'll worry about foot controllers. The fact of the matter is, in most applications I don't need to mess with effects on the fly. I'd even argue that's a bad idea in general.
My main problem with retail effects is the size. Getting a decent processor usually means it's a double rack space unit. But if you open them up they could have easily fit into a half rack space. I'm guessing this is an appeal to the same part of the brain that likes SUVs. I build my own combo amps, so I'd like to throw in a half rack effects module and maybe something else. But all I've found is the Roland Vf1 which isn't that great, isn't in production anymore and sells for $200+ used. Also, hey I built the amp... why not the processor as well?
I've not really dove into it yet, I dont like to start these projects myself. It's way easier to let someone else make all of the mistakes and solve the problems for me :-) Also, it seems the RPi has audio latency issues like just about every non-firewire based computer out there. You can fix it, but it's a nightmare of driver and hardware tweaking. I've got a guide: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wik... But that sounds like the typical thing you have to do. That level of complexity is terrifying when you're trying to do a live situation. If you haven't ever played in front of people... God hates live performances... anything that can go wrong, will. I've had retail, $1000+ processors fail live and leave me to just pull the damn plug in the end and go raw.
I've seen some Arduino projects that use a DSP chip and the arduino swaps out code from the chip to change effects... but that sounds insanely error prone to me. I could pull it off, but I would never really trust it.
So if anyone has any experience in this area, or links to articles they've found on the topic, I'd love to see them.
Cases have always been problem with the Raspberry Pi. They didn't really think about cases when they designed it. It's almost as if they just expected people to have the board sitting unprotected on the desk. I like that they actually have mounting holes now, which should help things out a lot.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
and there is plenty of RAM. No idea what you're trying to do with yours, running Windows on it?
Quite. If one grabs an RPi, sees the specs and tries to run a full blown desktop with heavyweight programs on it, it's going to suck. But that's not the fault of the RPi, that's the fault of the user.
The the real worls they work extremely well for a variety of tasks for which an armed and fully operational Linux computeris required, but where one doesn't really need the power to destroy whole planets.
Things I know they're used for:
OctoPi for running a 3D printer. The addition of $35 turns the printer into a network connected device and you no longer have to faff with SD cards, or leaving your laptop plugged in to monitor it.
Display controllers for various things. Add a Pi and a wifi dongle (cheap!) and you have a nice system which can be scriptes, pull data off the network, etc etc etc.
Door and equipment controllers: add an RFID reader and a USB relay and you now have a niec cheap, convenient little access control system.
Mocro servers for things like IRC bouncers and other tasks for which you have low bandwidth requirements but want on all the time.
And so on. They're not suitable for all tasks (DUH!) and there are are other ways of achieving the same thing (again, duh) but they are cheap, convenient, easy to get hold of, easily hackable, a great support compunity, well documented and Just Work.
It turns out that you don't need 16GiB of RAM and a few hundred GFlops of aggregate compute in order to do quite a wide variety of tasks.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Get off my lawn, ya spoiled brat. The Pi has 2000 times as much RAM as the Arduino Uno, a million times as much as a Picaxe.
It really isn't necessary to run Windows 8 for embedded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H any applications. You can run a full operating system with a GUI, web browser, and onboard server in 8 MB. How much more do you need?
I've been running Raspbmc (the most popular XBMC distro for Raspberry Pi) for a long time, and it has been excellent. It's small enough to be hidden behind my TV, and with an added remote control, offers one of the best user interfaces you'll find in a 'set top box'. Streams all my 1080p movies and TV shows flawlessly (*), and handles pretty much every codec under the sun. All for ~$40 (including HDMI cable, USB PSU, SD card and MPEG-2 license for hardware acceleration).
If you search for "Raspbmc" on YouTube, you'll see my experience is the norm. If you have any specific issues, post in the Raspbmc forums and someone will most likely sort you out. :)
As for Raspbian, I'm also running this on another Pi. It's certainly not going to replace x86 servers any time soon, but it certainly has its uses. Maybe your expectations are too high for a $35, 700MHz, 512MB machine?
* Apparently, it may struggle with some very high bit rate encodes, but I've yet to see this in practice and is unlikely to be an issue for most people.
Well the specs were modest for ARM SoCs even by 2012 standards. Deliberately so, given the mission to produce a $35 computer.
A rpi 2 with Broadcom's quad core Cortex-a7 SoC would still be no speed demon compared to an iPad Mini but adequate to run, say, Gnome/KDE with all the bells and whistles. (Whether they can achieve the same price envelope...)
A $35 computer will never match a 'desktop replacement', if you're used to a Corei7 workstation but should just about surpass the P4 I'm typing this on in the next iteration.
You call those shortcomings?!
The CPU is a few thousand times faster than any other microcontroller.
The RAM is 512 MEGABYTES - Most micros used in this same class have 32 to 128 KILOBYTES of RAM.
The PI is a moster powerhouse compared to any other microcontroller in its price class.
In fact the only boards that even compare are full blown embedded PC boards, which arguably is a class or two above what the Pi is targeted at (and cost way more than 2-3x still)
It's hardly the Pis fault you are trying to run a full blown Win8 OS on an embedded microcontroller. :P
Try that on an adruino and go bitch about how 8kb of ram just isn't enough to blink a led using Win8
You can use a software based solution that utilizes the PWM or PCM chip to generate pulses, and will let you drive 8 or more servos at a time: https://github.com/richardghir... [github.com]
yes as long as your input power adapter is decent
the B+ can provide upto 1200 mA
see
http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...
who where what when now?
Only if you think that adding a voltage regulator chip to your power supply is difficult. A 5v regulator, the 7805, costs about 50 cents a piece even when you buy them in very small quantities.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
All I can say is, I have something in the region of 300 1080p movies, mostly H.264 encoded, all of which play with no trouble at all. Google it, YouTube it, there are countless people doing the very same thing.
If you're not just trolling, report your issue in the Raspbmc forums, ideally with a link to a sample video for others to test with. I'll quite happily test a video or two on my Pi if you supply some links.
Don't read so much into it. Maybe people just have opinions. Relax.
Yes - we bring out both PWM outputs to the GPIO connector now.
Get one of these - works just fine (although was only £8 when I bought one), hdmi>dvi cables also work.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pro...
It is - you can go up to 1200ma if you have the PSU to support it http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...
I've tried it and it was beautiful. I have to assume you're trying to do something the hardware isn't capable of. It's fully capable of any sort of light computing tasks. It works well as a media machine. This in spite of the fact it was designed to be neither. It was designed to provide a low cost, low power, small and full featured computer board for educational use. At that purpose it's off the chain. People bitching because it wont transcode blue ray movies on the fly just pisses me off. If you say Raspbian doesn't work you either don't know what you're doing or you're lying.
FYI: in Hungary, B+ is the abbreviation of "f*ck you". So you've made our day.
That's the thing about the Pi, the add-ons just keep rolling in. The community support is unbelievable.
It's not pure software PWM, as it is using the seperate clock signal from the PCM chip for the timing of the pulses. It's worked fine for me so far, but I'm not doing anything precise either.
Isn't it following the old BBC Micro model names - model A, model B, model B+ etc.? The next one should be the 'Master'...
Only if you think that adding a voltage regulator chip to your power supply is difficult. A 5v regulator, the 7805, costs about 50 cents a piece even when you buy them in very small quantities.
Okay, you will need two of them, two caps and a heat sink in order to make input current and cover USB peripherals. Or you could spend $5 on eBay and get a boost-buck converter that would let you run it on 3-35V or so. Hmm, I see you can get them for $4 now, I believe I spent $6 actually. $5.37 from a US seller in FL. You can get 5 pcs from China eventually for $11... Bet you can get them around $1/ea by the case off alibaba. So whether you're a hobbyist or have a serious project in mind, the cost of a DC-DC power supply for the Pi just doesn't bear mentioning. It's easy to get 2A out. If you thermal-epoxy a heat sink onto the VR chip you can even get 3A out of some of these cheapies.
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I think the problem that people run into is that it's somewhere in the middle of where they want a device to be. For people who want true low power computing, Arduino is the way to go. Some people want to be able to run an actual desktop operating systems, hook up standard off the shelf peripherals and run a home server, or hook it up to their TV. This is what Mini ITX or Intel NUC machines do pretty well.
The problem is that the Raspberry Pi looks like the second kind of device, because you can install Linux on it, plug in USB devices, hook it up to your TV, and do many other desktop / media centric things. However, due to certain constraints like the slow processor, small amount of RAM, slow I/O, and insufficient power for USB, it seems to fall short of what many people envision using it for. I guess you can blame the customers because they bought something that wasn't really meant to fulfill their needs. But you also have to look at the way the device is marketed and designed. Why put all these USB ports if you can't actually hook up a bunch of USB peripherals? Why put an HDMI port on the thing if you don't have the power to drive a 1080 desktop environment? Why run full Linux when you don't have enough power to run most Linux applications?
Don't get me wrong, I think the RPi is a great little machine, but I think that many people get disappointed with it because from the person who's inexperienced with it, it looks very much like it's trying to be a full desktop replacement, but then get disappointed when they find out that it's really just great for running embedded machines.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The B+ redesign fixed the power problems, but not the core data loss.
The core problems of USB can't be fixed in B+, because the new board still uses the same old Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with its minimalist (only partial) USB controller. That's the reason for USB events being dropped when the ARM is busy and can't service the USB interrupts fast enough.
That SoC was never intended to support full USB operation on a general purpose computer, only light applications like plugging a flash drive into a set top box. Its use in Roku 2 is typical.
As a consequence of the SoC, the core USB problems won't disappear until a new SoC is chosen for a next generation Raspberry Pi.
The Pi box I have goes strictly for edge mounting,
it probably does that because the very first Model B rev 1 boards didn't have any holes in them.
Unless you're dead set on saving a few bucks, you're much better off getting little modules like this from a reputable source (with schematics, test results, and so on) than from fly-by-night eBay sellers. For example, here's a decent buck-boost from Pololu that fits the bill and it's that much more expensive.
If you start looking hard at some of the anonymously produced and undocumented stuff that comes from China, you'll scream. You wouldn't believe some of the rookie mistakes made in the design of (some of) those modules. Also, in some cases there are some serious compromises made to reach the lowest possible price.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
With the existing LAN connection being USB based, I don't think they will fix this for you anytime soon.
If you wanted to go Fast Ethernet (100BT) then there are loads of options for you at this price point, many which can be had for next to nothing at garage sales if you know what you are looking for. Finding some used router that can run OpenWRT (or other firmware) will serve you much better than a Pi for any application I can imagine where you'd need two Gigabit NICs.
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