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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?
...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.
1960s sci-fi was Moon bases and interstellar travel. Time lapse photography with a complex electronic timer instead of a mechanical clock is disappointing by comparison.
Mostly random stuff.
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 keep mine in the closet with my case of 8" floppies, my Zip drive, 2 old Palm pilots, and a used AT style keyboard.
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 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.
No clue.
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.
Actually, I think a surprisingly large number of them are running XBMC and working as media servers and (via services such as 1Channel) giving free access to a whole bunch of movies and TV content (albeit without the copyright-owners permission) :-)
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.
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)
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
Been seeing a lot of bad reviews on the banana pi. Particularly the SATA. I'm going to get one anyway just to see how it runs. The Raspberry Pi does well for what it is. If they don't like it they can find a lot of better ones for another 100 dollars or so.
I'll give you $25 dollars for it. That way you're only out 25 bucks.
You are so full of shit. Everyone talks about all the free or nearly free phones with all the capabilities that don't even exist. Sure, they're free if you sign up for a few years with a carrier. You can root them and then what? They run apps! They run fucking android! They're just a fancy phone/rollodex/gameboy wannabe. I don't see anyone using one to run a NAS although I know it can be done if you've got the skills but it's a pain in the fucking ass to use for anything like that. It was meant to be a phone and that's what it does best. The Pi was meant to be tinkered with. It's not going to replace your Quad I7 windows 8 machine but then it's only $35 dollars. Show me a fucking system for $35 that competes with it.