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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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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'
Yes - we bring out both PWM outputs to the GPIO connector now.
FYI: in Hungary, B+ is the abbreviation of "f*ck you". So you've made our day.
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.