The mini-PC now hugely popular with DIY geeks, who have used it to power their own creations
I do ARM development for the Fedora project (fedoraproject.org), and we used to be the so-called main distro for the RPI. We lost that to raspian, and the reason is nobody in the project actually wanted to use the RPI. It really is a very poor ARM device compared to all the others, and the central point is that it's using ARMv6. The cost is very high as all the thousands of packages would have to be recompiled to support the RPI, and sadly the RPI is the only ARMv6 board, most of the other ARMv6 were cell phones. That means it's more productive to target ARMv7 or ARMv5 as there were many many boards with those parts. Fortunatly the RPI will work with the ARMv5 software, and we have measured very minimal improvements by going with ARMv6 packages. Any anyhoo, nobody I know actually wants to use the RPI for anything. It's a bad boards. Right now the latest ARM hotness is the arndale boards, and the 2012 samsung chromebook that features an ARMv7 a15 exynos SoC. That bad boy supports hardware virtualization
That's also my experience.
The price tag makes it neat to tinker with for a day or two but very few people seem find a real-world application for it. I tried to use mine as a cheap Zoneminder surveillance solution, but the rPI barely managed a single camera at 640x480 with 2 (two) fps and motion detection. It was overclocked to "Turbo" too.
right now the fashionable ARM boards are: * panda board (omap4) [1]
* beagle board (omap3) [2]
* trimslice (tegra2) [3]
* arndale & chromebook (exynos5) [4]
* cubieboard (allwinner a10) [5] I've got all of these boards, and I like the pandaboard the most, then the trimslice.
For opensource events the one I use to demo fedora is usually the pandaboard.
That is because Texas Instruments did the best job at upstreaming the kernel code, so it works the best. The cubiboard is nice, it is the same SoC in the mk802 [6]... which is close to the price point of the Raspberry PI except is WAY much more powerful. I guess the question to you is what do you want to do? Do you plan to use any kind of GPIO pins, to say... use LEDs or interface to something else? Or would you be happy with just video output? [1] http://www.omappedia.com/wiki/PandaBoard
[2] http://beagleboard.org/
[3] http://trimslice.com/
[4] http://www.arndaleboard.org/
[5] http://cubieboard.org/
[6] http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/
Let's be honest... at this point, I want an HTPC that doesn't suck. Tweaking with other stuff would be awesome, but I just don't have time to play hacker. The pi was appealing because it was just enough hackery to make me feel 1337 without any of the actual effort involved in doing something real. There's probably a Roku that will do what I need for cheaper than the Pandaboard. I'm sure I can come up with reasons to do something more bitchin' than that, but I'd have to reach. Does that make sense?
No idea what htpc means or what a roku are. Regardless.... many boards I'm sure could fit your needs. Id suggest the mk802 since you probably wont be needing gpio pins.. the arm soc for those will be in mainline linux in the next few months... supported now in somebodys github
Can anybody here tell me from experience if the Rasperry Pi is right to learn a little about programming? I have all the resources to learn but I just need a clean slate, are these for me? As the link shows they are very popular but I dont know...
If you're trying to learn beginner programming I would not recommend starting with embedded devices. Even though the Raspberry Pi is much more than just an embedded device, it still presents some of the same challenges. If you have access to a PC then start there. Personally, I recommend Python but that's just my preference.
The point is, it doesnt really matter if I break a Pi I suppose. Which I probably will...
Depends on which programming language you are using. I started out with C/C+ + and I have had to restart my PC many a time because of memory leaks. I don't think that messing some stuff up is hard in C. However, as long as one keeps away from vital parts of the OS, nothing will go wrong with the basic stuff. harryjames, you can also set up a virtual machine on your PC. That way you can break all you want in the OS and learn a bit about the underlying OS. If you want to start out with programming and later move on to a pi (which is great fun btw), I recommend creating a virtual machine with something like Linux Mint or Debian since these linux distros are similar to Raspbian (the default RPi OS).
Thanks for the advice! Unfortunatlely my pc isn't usable, and hasn't been turned on in a few years. Will maybe give it a chance to redeem itself.
Maybe just run linux directly on the PC then? Just for the heck of it :P
I ruined an Xbox original trying to connect it to my phone, then dropped my new one. I can break... anything.
I've been watching them for about four months now; one of them did NOT end up under the tree probably because demand is so insanely high. Look at it this way: the cost of entry is stupid low. If you try it out and it isn't for you, sell it to me - I need to build an XBMC client and the rPi looks perfect.
The only thing I have against XBMC on a rpi is that it turns out to be really slow and you need to buy additional codecs if you want it to work the way you intended it. Then again, I have a first generation RPi with 256mb RAM. The second generation has 512mb of ram. That might work better.
I think that it could work. The problem isn't in response times when doing light tasks like showing pictures. You could even remove Xorg and just use framebuffers if I am not mistaken. Photo server could work if you can find the right software. I don't know if samba is too heavy for a RPi to be honest.
All really needed to create a picture frame is a little hacking on the LCD and use of software which has already been written, like feh combined with X11 as a display server. There will not be too much programming involved. Mostly bash scripting to get the components to behave correctly and some tweaking on the OS itself. Do you have experience with linux?
My experience with linux is in command line hacks on OS X and installing knoppix on a dead PC in order to rebuild a ZFS RAID5 array in man-down formation in order to rescue my data. Which is not to say I wouldn't like more because Apple is swirling the bowl. I've got a Macbook with a near-dead hinge that I intended to Ubuntu up but I've been busy. Kinda seems like my best move would be to buy one and fuck around. Yes?
Seems that way. The cost of entry is quite low and it is great fun. ZFS on linux? That is a new one for me.
It was a thin client that ran embedded linux on a board. Plugged directly into the IDE port. BIOS would boot, hit the thin client on the first IDE port, and the embedded linux would take over. Cheapest, easiest way to build a herkin' NAS back before anyone was building NAS. I had 5 250GB drives back when 250GB drives were $200 per. And it provided ZFS, which everyone thought was badass, so I built the NAS ZFS. Because, after all, the thin client wasn't going to take a shit so why worry? Then the BIOS on the mobo took a shit and took the thin client with it. I had to build a fucking PC just to get my data out of it. Last time I ran RAID5 lemme tell ya.
XBMC is a wonderful thing. Actually, I believe a rPi was used in our apartment to set that up.
I've got Plex running on a Mac Mini. Problem is, when you're running both the head and the server on one device you lose efficiencies. ...and when your Mac Mini was new in 2007 you start tripping over your 1080P. an rPi XBMC head seems like a delightfully tinkerish method of resolving the problem.
Maybe you should consider upgrading your mac Mini to a later ~2010 model then! Performance is no issue on these machines because Plex' GPU hardware decoding implementation of the 320m is really, really good. You can play back a full bitrate 1080p Bluray rip with < 10% CPU usage and get plenty of headroom for other stuff in the background (multiple other PMS transcoding sessions, unpacking, etc). Add a small SSD and that HTPC/Homeserver-machine should last until 4k gains traction. The rPi is just too slow for high quality playback. OpenELEC comes pretty close and out-of-the-box HDMI-CEC is amazing, but the bad performance ultimately ruins the whole user experience for me.
If I can get one that is! Just try and get your hands on a Original and chip it, they like wheat thins online.
Newark has them: http://www.newark.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=43W53... MCM has them: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/83-14421&scode=GS4... I know the tweakers like to pretend that you can't buy them anywhere and they're rare as hen's teeth but when you can buy an f'ing BUD box for them they're mainstream: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/2077489186435993825?... EDITED to reflect that I'm so sleep deprived at the moment that I didn't even notice I contradicted myself in 10 minutes. What can I say - I'd been following /r/raspberrypi but it wasn't until I typed "raspberry pi" into Google that I discovered that really - the things ARE NOT RARE.
Thankyou so much! Will be putting in an order soon.
Carl H's programming lessons are a very good place to learn. Start with the basics before you move onto embedded systems.