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Eben Upton Explains the Raspberry Pi Model A+'s Redesign
M-Saunders writes It's cheaper, it's smaller, and it's curvier: the new Raspberry Pi Model A+ is quite a change from its predecessor. But with Model Bs selling more in a month than Model As have done in the lifetime of the Pi, what's the point in releasing a new model? Eben Upton, a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, explains all. "It gives people a really low-cost way to come and play with Linux and it gives people a low-cost way to get a Raspberry Pi. We still think most people are still going to buy B+s, but it gives people a way to come and join in for the cost of 4 Starbucks coffees."
If they'd only make the thing faster with more RAM. It's pretty under powered for a modern single board computer. Sure, you can overclock, but why not just up the specs and call it a model C?
I don't know, but it works for me.
Is that how we are measuring costs now? What happened to movie tickets or six packs of beer?
>We still think most people are still going to buy B+s, [...]
He's absolutely right. Most people want integrated ethernet.
I actually really like the redesign. One reason I didn't buy the previous Model A was that I already had a Model B in the same form factor. This one is nicely squared, will fit in a project box nicely, and is definitely fast enough for some of the project I have in my head. Plug a cheap wifi dongle in and you've got a great IoT platform to play with. It's on par for price with the CC3200 from TI, and while it doesn't have PWM it'll still do quite a lot and is significantly faster than the CC3200.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
HDMI alone is not very useful since most displays don't actually support this, you get a much better range of supported devices by having a composite out. This would fare better by dropping the HDMI and keeping the composite instead.
Here at work, people have built essentially the same project (USB control of relays) with three different platforms, an Arduino, an rPi, and an old Pentium with MBs of RAM. All three did the job.
The Pi processor runs 44 times as fast as the Arduino, meaning it was 44 times as fast as needed for the purpose it was used for. The Pi has 512 MB of RAM, the Arduino accomplished the same task and has 2 Kb of RAM. The Pi has up to 16 GB of flash storage, the Arduino 32 KB.
So they ALREADY did "up the specs" to about 50 times as powerful as needed for these types of tasks. The Arduino used for the project cost $5-$10, the Pi $35.
Suppose the Pi had 2 GB of RAM and cost $150, would you suggest that they "up the specs" to 4 GB and $250? If that's what you want, you can get it here:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell...
The Pi isn't a desktop computer. It's designed for particular types of tasks, and those tasks don't need gigs of ram. In fact, looking at the Pi-related web sites and the Arduino related web sites, the applications are often very similar, which indicates that the Pi is way over-speced for the many of the applications it is used for.
When I started my web hosting business we offered servers that ran Linux, just like the Pi does. The standard dedicated server had 256 MB of RAM, the upgraded option had 512 MB - just like the Pi. Web sites served hundreds of GBs of traffic every month off those 512 MB servers. Why does the Pi need more?
Stop "incrementing" a model designation when there are serious changes to form-factor, pinouts, layouts, etc.
This causes lots of breakage, e.g., B cases will not fit B+, due to multiple changes in form-factor and connector layout.
B+ should have been called C, etc.
Apple lawsuit in 3...2...1
The 3D fad pushed up prices of movie tickets to make them less useful as a market basket, and alcoholic beverages aren't lawfully available to the high school students for whom the Raspberry Pi was designed.
How long until number of Starbucks coffees becomes the global cost basis across currencies?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Faster would be nice, of course, but there are just scads of applications that don't require it. I use my pi B+ machines via SSH shell, not a desktop. In that environment, typically I have midnight commander up for both its editing capabilities and the simplification it provides for common operations; I write Python, which as one of the fastest scripting languages and really doesn't seem to be noticeably slow within the context of the B+. I drive relay boards (Sainsmart... the PiFace is a joke, severely limiting both voltage and current due to insufficient trace widths / clearance on the PCB) and use those relay boards to perform a number of remote-able tasks for me. I just don't feel a lack of speed.
However, I *do* notice swapping from time to time when I'm editing and testing, and (of course) there is a speed drop then, but that's not something you can attribute to the CPU. It's happening because the machine simply doesn't have enough RAM; I have read (somewhere... can't be sure), there are SOC versions that do upgrade the RAM available that are essentially drop-ins. If that's the situation, then I would be *very* willing to swap out the B+ boards for C+ or whatever such a thing would be called. As we have all known for years, there are few things that contribute as much to a smoothly running modern OS as enough RAM so it can really breathe.
I can't say I have any interest at all in the A; I didn't even bother with the pi until the B+ became available. The B+, however, strikes me as a wonderful platform, and when you add the cheap sensors and other hardware, plus the drivers... whahoo. :)
We have three here already, and I'm probably about to add a fourth.
If you're a shell/raspian user, tip of the day is:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mc
Then either:
mc
or
sudo mc
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Olympic size swimming pools filled with Starbucks coffee for large quantities.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
While the Pi is good for most of its intended tasks, it is lacking in many areas. The Beaglebone is a good upgrade but it too has shortcomings. But if you need more power, the Beagle team has another board in the pipeline.
If you want some serious power for an embedded project look no further than the Beagleboard X15. This thing is going to be a beast:
Dual core A15 ARM @ 1.5GHz
2GB DDR3L RAM
Dual core GPU (unfortunately PowerVR SGX, not open source friendly)
2D accelerator and Video accelerator
Dual C66x DSP processors
Dual Cortex M4 Image processors (only one is user programmable)
Dual PRU-ICSS ( programmable cpu accelerator to offload ethernet packet processing for industrial protocols like Ethercat, Profinet, etc.)
eSATA
USB 2.0 and 3.0
Dual PCIe ports, Gen 2, one x1 and one x2 (Yes they will be routed to ports)
Appears to have some type of video in, probably a camera port.
And more...
Rumored to cost about $150. Yes it costs much more than the Pi but you get what you pay for; a boat load of processing power and memory.
I am using mine as a web, email, storage and proxy server which works surprisingly well. Uptime is in excess of 60 days, although I have seen others reaching way more(I do patch my kernels after all).
;-)
One thing I have noticed is that WordPress is an extreme hog when it comes to wasting resources, hence static sites help out a lot(as well as a PHP cache).
Not really practical compared to a VPS but nothing beats having this warm fuzzy feeling of having your own underpowered hardware surviving against a horde of script kiddies and an abusive admin
As I mentioned, there is a large overlap between the applications people use Pis and Arduino for. That was one example I have recent personal experience with. If you want a computer with a few GB of RAM, there are several thousand options to choose from. We don't need one more 2-4GB computer.
> I drive relay boards
> We have three here already, and I'm probably about to add a fourth.
If you need to drive a lot of relays, you might consider a serial-to-parallel chip feeding a ULN2803 octal darlington array. That's about $2.50 of electronics per eight relays. With connectors and such, call it $0.50-$1 per relay. You can connect up to 256 addressable serial-to-parallel chips to a single IO on one Pi (or a PC, through a $2 level shifter). So for the price of another Pi, you can add 35-70 more relay outputs to your existing Pi.
The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)
But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm doing an embedded project using the B+. The main reason why I like the B+ is that I'm using all the new GPIO pins from that model. The A+ has the same GPIO pins which is awesome on a lower price device.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
after the Raspberry Pi foundation made clear they do not care about journalistic integrity...
http://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/2jfcoi/raspberry_pi_twitter_account_takes_official_and/
from this tweets it's not even clear to me, which "side" they are taking.
Gamergate should have been ended a long time ago. Just ignore the attention horses and it will solve itself.
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