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Raspberry Pi Sales Approach 4 Million
Eben Upton's reboot of the spirit of the BBC Micro in the form of the Raspberry Pi would have been an interesting project even if it had only been useful in the world of education. Upton wanted, after all, to give the kind of hands-on, low-level interaction with computing devices that he saw had gone missing in schools. Plenty of rPis are now in that educational, inspirational role, but it turns out that the world was waiting (or at least ready) for a readily usable, cheap, all-in-one computer, and the Raspberry Pi arrived near the front of a wave that now includes many other options. Sales boomed, and we've mentioned a few of the interesting milestones, like the millionth unit made in the UK and the two-millionth unit overall. Now, according to TechCrunch the Raspberry Pi is getting close to 4 million units sold, having just passed 3.8 million, as reported in a tweet. If you have a Raspberry Pi, what are you using it for now, and what would you like to see tweaked in future versions?
3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.
1GB would be nice, a faster cpu but keep it under $50.
What the world really needed was an incredibly small, incredibly cheap SoC board that worked. Now you can actually control what your remote sensors do, or write rules for your home automation, or whatever else you can possibly think of because the thing is a computer the size of a credit card. That's some real 1960s sci-fi.
I use mine running a cron job to take a time lapse photo of the construction across the street.
I have a Raspberry Pi loaded with ROMs and emulators. I lay on my bed and play all the old classics. My Pi is hooked into a projector and I get a nice big picture to play on. I also sometimes turn it off and swap SD cards and stream movies from my PC over the projector. Sometimes I pack up the projector, the Pi, some PC speakers, and some controllers and take it out to the bar, where I hook it up and convince people to buy me beer for a go at their favorite game.
...practical jokes at work (PIR sensor and speakers, LEDs and servo hooked up) and sometimes linux test box. Would like a camera that works more seamlessly with OpenCV though.
what would you like to see tweaked in future versions?
No closed-source binaries, obviously!
We're using it to do a web page-based UI for a commercial product. The RasPi people are looking for commercial users, so we decided to try it out. It's far less expensive than other commercial SBCs, and being Linux based, it's a known quantity (no nasty proprietary OS or API to deal with), and the RasPi has a large user base, so hopefully, no unannounced obsolescence. Only drawback is that we need a HDMI converter board between the RasPi and the bare TFT panel. We still come in at around $200 for the entire display subsystem.
What would be like RaspPi, but without the USB problem?
I am building a word processor (a glorified typewriter), so I do not need for extra processor speed or memory, but USB packet loss manifesting itself as stuck(!) keys is a pain in the posterior.
...not much.
why do you need more memory ?
that would need a new SOC
or the memory option only would need some memory manufacturer to retool to make a 8Gb POP module [old tech no one is going to do that now]
who where what when now?
it is so slow and awful, 50 bucks down the drain.
Does Broadcom have any worthwhile chips? The RaPi is already slow compared to just about anything else. We're at a point where you can't give away phones with just 512MB and a single core ARMv6 processor, but that's what Broadcom had, so that's what the Broadcom engineers built the RaPi on...
I use mine as a media server, running the Logitech Media Server (LMS) for four Squeezeboxes. I have a 64GB flash drive for the music. It also runs the Apache web server for a MySQL and Perl-based book-tracking database with an on-line interface that I and a couple friends use.
Banana Pi is $49, dual-core, 1GB RAM
I would have said that I didn't want to use HDMI cables to connect a display for embedded apps, since the cable is bulky and expensive. But now there are cheap displays that plug right into the GPIO lines, so that issue is gone. And four USB ports is plenty (on the new model), and the expanded GPIO lines mean you don't need to add in an Arduino just for I/O. So after that it's just the usual - faster and/or cheaper are always nice.
The only real thing missing is quite hard - an ability to do realtime I/O control. That's not really in the Pi, but the Linux OS. If there were a good realtime option, then the Pi would be an awesome controller (e.g. for 3d printing, CNC, etc.). As it is, you need an Arduino control I/O so you have precise timing, which adds complexity as you have to program two devices to coordinate, which is much harder than one. Not impossible, obviously, but simpler/easier is better.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
Mine sits and collects dust. I love to have one in the arsenal but I don't use it much. I got mine early when there was huge waiting list. My receipt says and invoice says I am receiving the 512 mb model but free only shows 256 :(
- 1Gb/s PoE interface
- 1GB of ram
when they hit 3.14 million sales. Lost opportunity
Have 5 of them. 1 used for offsite backup to a usb drive, 1 to display server stats, others used for xmbc.
I'd like to see a faster cpu, the loading times in xbmc on the rpi are annoying.
All ARMs seem to be so different. I want distros to be able to release an ARM version that just works on all ARM devices. It seems like all ARM devices need custom builds. The smaller guys suffer for this. I want a cubox, but it seems like only software made by them works on it.
Just got PCDuino 3 nano last month for $39. 2 core ARMv7@ 1ghz, 1GB ram, gigabit ethernet, sata connector, better GPU. Looks promising so far...
For the first time in ages there is a computer that comes bundled with Mathematica and has shortcuts to programming IDEs on desktop. Contrast this with what modern mainstream OSes and even Linux distros like Ubuntu come bundled with. Even being 40 years old, I am tempted to learn how to make these cools 3D graphs and drive some from some simple sensors attached to GPIO pins. Say graph of daylight and its changes over seasons. For kids I think it makes a huge difference what you put in front of them and iPads fail pathetically in promoting actual learning.
That's not problem with the Pi. That's a problem with your power supply.
Any idea where those can be bought?
Or whatever they're going to call it now... Really did buy it expecting to use it to learn Python. But since I always wanted my own jukebox, now I've got it. Combined it with an FM transmitter kit from Ramsey Electronics, now I have my music anywhere in the house, controlled by iPhone.
Mine is currently actively used to fill a box which would otherwise be useless. I'm very happy for the box now having a meaningful purpose in life.
For what i was planning to do, one plan did not work due to obscure compatibility reasons which boiled down to floating points and a buggy database connection. The other plan - using it as motion capture, did not work as the USB webcam driver / or webcam / would crash on occasion but definitively overnight. Might have to do with the bad USB power output causing instability.
I would have used it as media player if the sound output wasn't of such bad quality.
Overall, i think the project is nice and all but the hardware is of inferior quality. If you are serious about embedded devices or building robots or so there is, and existed for long, much better hardware.
I admit the price is low. However, to me the key sales point is that it's a standardized platform with several linux distributions ready to roll. So, the community around it makes it great. But for any serious project the hardware s*x big time. I'd rather have that community and a slightly more expensive device that performs as expected (as in: proper USB, total open hardware without vague GPU blobs, more and better IO pins with for example a 12-bit A/D converter arduino style, quality audio in and out, etc etc).
Nevertheless i'm impressed by the momentum. I also think newer generations might fix the hardware issues they have. But just in my view, just focusing on 'as cheap as possible' was a terrible design decision. Had all hardware be high-end, like USB conforming specs, then it would be golden.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
I would prefer DisplayPort instead of HMDI.
If you start with DP you can convert over to HDMI passively, but going the other way, you need a powered convertor box of some kind. DP can also support multiple monitors per plug, whereas HDMI was designed around the one-display-per-plug idea.
revision: RPI C++ 2usb+WiFi-bgn (BCM43143) +BT4/BLE?
future RPI 2.0:
ARMv8 little+big w/ARMv6 compaability
Faster Clockspeed 1250-2133MHz
Smaller Process (for less power at same speed/more speed same power)
HPGP/HPAV2 (with special pass-t
HDMI+DVI-I (dvi adapter for vga or 2nd hdmi without gpio usage)
Build in DCON (display refresh with soc off/in deep sleep)
WiFi/BT4/BLE?
other: RPI with 512mb mram instread of dram (for diskless operation/booting)
other: XOPC with RPI SOC & Pixel Qi HiRes display
The Pi's biggest problem is that afterthought they decided to call "GPIO", and its unfortunate design is a serious hindrance to anyone trying to learn machine interfaces. A straightforward PORT BASED interface, with good docs, would go so much further in allowing people to connect a decent amount of processing power to the real world, and that's the kind of learning the Pi should excel at providing!
Admittedly, the Pi GPIO is better than the unfortunate Galileo disaster, but it could be SO much better..
I originally bought one for the kids, but now I some how have almost a dozen of them.
The Pi tends to be a great little problem solver. Between small size, cheap price, low power requirments, fairly easy to make use of gpio, and great comunity.
So its very easy to go from a problem or a wouldnd't it be great if... to a solution.
Example
Last year, had two major floods(one cause by a failed pump, one caused by a prolonged power outage) in the basement both times while out of town. Got to the point that the girlfriend didn't feel comfortable leaving the house for any large amount of time incase it happened again.
A weekend worth of time a Raspberry Pi, and an assortment of parts most of which I had on hand. I now get updates to my phone about the status of the sump pump (is it running, how often, how much water, is my basement flooded), and the status of the power in the house.
As far as future models go... It would be nice to see something lets say double the speed, double the cores, double the ram, double the gpio, for less then double the price. USB3 and gigabit ethernet would also be more then welcome as well.
With so many alternatives there is something for everyone, but I kind of wish for a version with a functional network controller and no graphical output.
I have about 10-20 units for logging various digital outputs, clock synchronization, print server and several other no-frill applications :)
No clue.
home automation server aggregating 8x temperatures, 4x humidity, weather station, 6xPIRs, 2x NFC readers, 2x CO, 6x pressure, 3x cameras, and 1 relay for thermostat, about half of these are still running via arduino nano clones as I migrate to purpose-built ICs. presently also hosting 6tb of files, but it gets bogged down when 2 PIR activated cameras are recording while streaming 720p+ video so will likely offload this to a separate unit during next overhaul.
have a separate one for building out things before I add to the above, presently ~13x reed switches, and 16x relays as I migrate from sensing to control.
coupled to my router running vpn and a webserver, I get all I want at ~10W tdp.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bananna+pi
I couldn't resist.
So Slashdot is asking what should be improved in the RasPi.
What a fucking laugh!
These idiots have failed miserably at listening to their own users complain about the Beta interface.
But they feel qualified to host a critical discussion about RasPi.
Gimme a break!
I bought my RPi as the primary interface for my Tiki Bird. Really enjoyed the project. Lot's of good open source stuff available. WiringPi for GPIO control. Vixen for sequencing. LIRC for infrared control.
I also enjoyed doing autopsy on a Squawkers McCaw. It's incredible the amount of sensing and control they packed into such a cheap toy.
Remember, The Bird is the Word!
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
Not bad for $50! (I bought an 8GB SD card preloaded with NOOBS and a case as well.) We're off grid here at Breitenbush, so the fact that it's easy on the power consumption is a big plus. I'm not sure if there's a daughtercard for this, but more memory would be nice. Mine uses aprx to act as an I-Gate for APRS and drives a TNC-X built from a kit (http://www.tnc-x.com/) and takes audio from the scanner from a USB Signalink (http://www.tigertronics.com/slusbmain.htm) which has a few extra features that make it really nice for this app. Y'all already know about Samba.
Tony Jeffries
These are great little boards for industrial automation projects!
I've used about a dozen of these in various configurations for everything from greenhouse controllers, to high end fish aquarium controllers, to data logging and serving up a web UI for a personal weather station. They've been an excellent price-competitive SBC. So cheap that it's often easier to just swap them out if they fail (I've fried a couple myself).
I designed a small stack of boards that expands the Pi to include:
- A base board with battery-backed RTC, watchdog timer, wide-input switching supply for +5V and +3.3V rails, Dallas/Maxim 1-wire sensor interface, buffered/isolated I2C master as well as a TTL and true RS-232 ports.
- A 16-channel AC driver board for 24-240VAC loads such as contactors and valves
- 32-bit DIO board
- 4-20mA input board (for industrial sensors)
- A prototyping board
You can see an early prototype here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...
The new B+ model is supposed to be better since they redesigned the power supply to be a switcher vs. an old linear style design, plus they've doubled the onboard USB ports.
I connected it via usb to a kindle touch device which acts as a screen, so I can write without the need for a computer.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=216501
(HPGP/AV2 with special passthrou power supply)
GBE w/POE1+2
Teletext support on TV out
Considering that Broadcom closed the division that was engineering the BCM2835 (and successors), which SoC will the RPi foundation switch to?
Two nics would allow for many network related functions to be performed by the RaspberryPI. Currently the single nic is quite limiting if you have ~30+ MBit of bandwidth to your home.
Mine is a workhorse. It's a web/nagios server, a seafile server with an external drive, and my print server. Love it. I'd like more RAM and CPU... Of course.
1. Put all the connectors on one side of the board.
2. USB 3.0
3. More ram.
4 Faster CPU.
5. Built in Flash.
6. Fix all known problems.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
the pi isn't that useful in itself, but it's great inspiration once you pick a device, say 'this should have a little computer in it', and go from there
i bought mine as a 'spare cheap linux thingie', and after i did the usual nerdy tweaks and patches and automating maintainance junk that i always do, it sat there powered up for years not doing any good. i couldn't even run it as a time server (my initial plan) since i found it didn't have an RTC and i didnt' care to install one
then i got the idea to build it into my car to do "something". i didn't really know what. music?
regular car pcs aren't that interesting, but what the hell. i got a 12v to 5v power supply, got wireless working on it so i could manage it from my living room, and mounted it in my glove compartment.
it ended up inspiring a chain of r&d packed with scope creep and overengineering that burned off many hundreds of hours of my boredom time:
- dissecting how the serial datastream from my car's ecm worked
- learning about raw ftdi commands and eventually resigning myself to learing libftdi
- writing a toolkit to manage the datastream in c
- make the entire thing threaded and modular and have tons of crazy debugging and error checking features
- learn how github works, just for a change over my other revision control choices
- develop my own retarded configuration file format so it could be hacked to work with other cars (why? i have no idea)
- trying to achieve the maximum throughput of requests/responses
- hacking together a little ncurses dashboard of various engine parameters
- writing a standardized datalogging interface that logged everything, all the time
- interfacing it with analog signals to get more data (wideband o2 sensor input)
- writing a decent datalog analyzer program to make use of the data to better tune the car, to the point of where i could just execute a binary and get new more accurate fueling tables handed to me
if it wasn't for the pi, i never would have learned about all that junk in such detail, and my car wouldn't run so well!
it was full of challenges, limited usb ports, hacking the usb ports so the wireless adaptor wouldn't overload the thermal fuses, the lack of RTC meant logging timestamps could never work properly (used a 'global time index counter' type thing), etc.
i can keep going too, if i make this thing play music, i can rig it up so it becomes an inspired dj, plays slow calm tracks for crusing around, and hard fast tracks when i start driving harder.. i also plan to rig the GPIO up to my steering wheel controls to do nifty things like be able to control my idle speed with what used to be a volume control..
money well spent for sure.
if i had to hack a real car pc together, or butcher a laptop to build it into my dash, i probably wouldn't have bothered due to the initial cost and time investment. once it's there, you just can't resist hacking on it.
I use mine for video playing primarily. It makes a surprisingly good low-power HD media center to hook to, say, a digital home theater projector, so long as your gear is all HDMI enabled and your video is all h264. Its really shit for anything that needs more bandwidth than a USB bus though; because that's all it has; a USB bus. Even a PC from 1998 can easily blow the doors off it for general I/O throughput to disk and ethernet due to this somewhat unfortunate limitation. If all the on-board parts were interconnected with a PCI bus it would actually be a really great little machine for general purposes.
The *primary* problem with it though is that the closed-source binary components and the Linux kernel customizations are done incredibly sloppily and there is just about zero sense of transparency or trustworthyness in that part of the development process. There are *frequent* regressions in core functionality of these components, especially with regards to the HDMI capabilities and some of the cooler features such as CMA which hasn't actually worked as far as I can tell since late 2012, but I couldn't find anyone else, officially affiliated with the project or otherwise, to admit to having ever tested it. So that's what I'd fix first; OPEN SOURCE ALL OF IT.
Oh, and the Raspbian support community is full of pretentious asshats.
I used my Pi to synchronize blinking of Christmas lights to a MIDI audio. I made a blog post that describes all the details of how I did it here:
http://chivalrytimberz.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/pi-lights/
I mounted one on the basement wall next to my home router. It serves as an SSH gateway into my home network, and as a low power web server.
theres tons of em on ebay, my Banana pi kicks Raspberry pi's ass any day! Perfect for running kali linux for some "science" and maybe even an Alfa Awus036NHA adapter with an Yagi Uda antenna!
I use my Pi as an ad-blocking DNS server, amongst other network-admin related things, and dual gigabit LAN would be a huge plus. I wouldn't even mind if it was $70 instead of $35.
Use it as an ultra low power always on server: SSH, DNS, proxy, file, media etc. Much more power-friendly than a laptop server, and sufficiently powerful for day-to-day tasks.
It would sure be nice to be able to program an alarm to wake the RPi from a suspended, low power state.
I control my lawn irrigation system with a Sprinkler Pi (http://rayshobby.net). Web accessible and even has a smart phone app available. I can even set it up to not water based on yahoo weather forecasts. If the raspberry pi seems intimidating, you can even get a pre-built system based on Arduino that has a traditional LCD and buttons for programming but can also still be used for web access.
I bought a Pi to stick into an old Sony Boombox that had a worn out CD player. I added a WiFi USB adapter andI loaded MPD/MPC on it and use it to stream music from the house server. I mostly use it in in the garage and the backyard. I added a USB sound adapter, and spliced its output into the boombox's CD input. Sounds great and now I can listen to any of the albums I've loaded on the server instead of having to carry CDs with the boombox.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Not on its own of course, the onboard sound is lousy, but with a cheap add-on DAC it makes a good digital music source for hifi. The CPU and RAM is sufficient for the task, it's running headless so I don't care about the GPU, and at under 2W I don't care about leaving it permanently on. I have 2 SOCs feeding my hifis, one on an RPi and one on a CuBox (considerably more powerful). There isn't much to choose between them to be honest, the CuBox indexes new files slightly more quickly and the RPi doesn't need a huge great ugly external optical SPDIF DAC sat next to it. But the CuBox cost 3 times as much.
There are ANDROID phones for as little as £30 and I've gotten ones for £40 that are more capable than the Pi, and, while only having one USB port, combined with an OTR host cable and a USB switch, are much less likely to drop packets than the Pi is.
The Pi was a good marketing gimmick at a time when the mom and pops guys hadn't quite gotten the inertia up, despite embedded prices going down, but thanks to cheap chinese labor, combined with 'open hardware' design houses across the globe, there are far far far better options available nowadays.
Nevermind that the majority of people are using them as fucking media players and for that you're better off with a 40-120 dollar android tv box, ranging from a quad core cpu and 512 megs of ram, all the way up to 2 gigs with a quad A17 processor, wifi, a native ethernet port, bluetooth, hdmi, composite out, and generally 2-3 usb ports. Hell, some of them even have a SATA port!
Point being people are buying them for the hype over 'for the job', and most of them are going to hipsters and yuppies rather than people dabbling in, or pushing the boundaries of, the (open) hardware movement.
Add two more GigE ports so it can run PFSense.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Banana Pi is $49, dual-core, 1GB RAM
Like it, but it needs a heatsink - or at least it ships from Amazon with one. So it's likely a little too hot for many applications RasberryPi works fine well for.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
ASRock D1800B-ITX
A bit bigger and the RAM is not included, but takes up to 16GB.
I guess the parellel port will do some basic GPIO duties. I'll even call it a single board computer.
smaller process equals lower cost or more features
Troll.
I'm using BeagleBone Black. Not wedded to it - it was just handy. Any of several others would have worked, but this was available and had the right stuff available, too.
$55, half a gig of RAM, four gig of flash filesystem (plus a socket for adding more).
Runs Linux (and several other OSes with ARM support.). Comes stock with Agngstrom but I installed a port of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and an upgrade to the corresponding kernel version. (The stock Ubuntu port to BBB uses an older kernel, but there's another project that ports later kernels as drop-in replacements.)
The kind of capabilities you are looking for are out there.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.
Leaving 5,000 of them doing something interesting and useful - and probably something that couldn't be done affordably with a brain that cost $800 or more.
If the computer costs just chump change, who CARES if most of them end up gathering dust? The cost of that is trivial, which the benefit of those that DO get used is substantial.
It's like pencil sharpeners (back before cheap automatic pencils): They spend almost all of their time idle. But they're so cheap that it makes more financial sense to have one in every office than to have one for the company and a department scheduling its time-sharing.
(That analogy was acutally used, to get executives to rent a clue, during the transition from central timesharing systems to ubiquitus desktop machines. When a computer costs several million and needs a clean room and dedicated hierarchy, it makes sense to have one and spend a lot of effort rationing it out. When one costs a thousand bucks it's far cheaper to put them on every desk and leave most of them horribly under-utilized. Such a price drop creates a qualitative change to resource allocation strategies.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I use it for ownCloud and some monitoring staff.
With 2 SATA and gigabit LAN will be good FTP server.
Because RadioSpares took over six months to deliver my order I'd moved on to MK82's and other devices long before my Pi even arrived. A friend of mine ordered his through Newegg at the same time and got his inside of 3 weeks.
I'm using it to run a real-time machine learning algorithm for near chaotic combustion control. The ultimate goal is higher fuel efficiency with less CO2 emissions. Here's a YouTube video about the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'd like to see an RTC and a power switch/button on the next RPi.
I'm not sure the project goals of giving kids "hands-on, low-level interaction with computing devices" have been met. Linux is just too powerful/complex an OS to offer that to kids. You can use python modules to program the GPIO pins, but as soon as you do that you're getting into electronics and might as well use one of the Arduinos (which have a lot less abstraction).
It's a nice form factor at a nice price, and i have a few (doing various things) but they're not kid friendly any more than a PC is.
How many times have you seen an old, embedded system with a bunch of proprietary electronics in it and thought, "well that sucks". There are people out the still selling this kind of solution for unreasonable sums of money, and the Pi can often do everything they do, and do it better. It can interface to practically anything, and it's so cheap you can keep spares on-hand to replace any failed units. Hell, you can even assign one unit to poll all the others and report failed units. /exciting/.
Configuration is a dream too. Just a matter of putting the right data on the SD card they boot from. These little buggers are
You're going to wait a long while to get those extra features at that price. What are you, fifteen?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'd love to see USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet on there. Hell, throw in onboard wifi while you're at it.
I bought a pack of graphics card memory heat sinks really cheap ($9), and turned them into 4 sets of Raspberry Pi heat sinks (one for SoC, one for Ethernet).
parallel port is not the same. It doesn't support wide range of voltages, internal pull-ups, or the ability to assign functions to the pins. I guess assigning functions makes them SPIOs (special purpose, rather than general purpose). But having the hardware be able to generate an interrupt for any pin, or use hardware fifos for I2C and SPI is a huge advantage.
The ASRock D1800B-ITX is a neat board, but getting the ATX power supply is going to cost more than a Raspberry Pi. I suspect you'd end up spending around $180 getting the board, psu, ram and ssd. Still not a bad deal, but not really in the same category as RPi for price.
A better comparison against an ASRock is the Nvidia Jetson TK1 dev kit (newegg carries them) is $200. And include quad core ARM, GPU, 16GB flash, 2GB RAM and power supply. It's a bit smaller than an ITX board, and quite a bit larger than a RPi.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
True but you're well under $180 if you use a cheapie ITX case w/ 65W PSU, one stick of 2GB (new or bought from someone who upgrades a laptop) and an 8GB USB flash drive or no local storage at all (boot from the network)