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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?
what would you like to see tweaked in future versions?
No closed-source binaries, obviously!
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!
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.