Raspberry Pi - The alpha boards are here | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi - The alpha boards are here

raspberrypi.org

74 pointsDanWaterworth26 comments

I get the impression that it's becoming easier to knock together a linux system on a custom motherboard build around ARM.

I have a project where I'm trying to get USB-to-ethernet to work for pandaboard. But I'd prefer to have two ethernet adapters on the board.

If it's becoming straightforward to built these platforms, how long until you can just go to a website, click some checkboxes, and order a set with the features you want?

Update: another issue. If you're running several of these things, you need multiple DC adapters plugged into the wall. This seems like waste - it would be useful to have a single power unit with multiple leads. Does anyone have ideas about getting such a unit?

Its not that straightforward yet, but there is a whole bunch of companies who will do much of the work if you dont want to.

You can get PCBs made up in small quantities at ok costs then you need a bunch of equipment to solder chips on. For small quantities you can do it manually. Then when you are happy you can go for volume, with automated insertion. We did this some years back in a startup.

But you can probably find an existing platform that has what you want if you dont want big volume. Eg this has two ethernets http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=DreamPlug not sure what else you need.

For power, you could use a pc style power supply. You can get them in lots of sizes and voltages.

I've been looking into embedded ARM systems with ethernet lately.

The Pandaboard & Beagleboard are completely out since my embedded RTOS application has no USB stack.

The two boards we're dealing with are the TS7800 and the Gumstix Overo series. For you, the Overo on a Tobi Duo is a reasonable way to get dual ethernet, though it's only 100mbit. The 7800 has only a single gigabit.

The abundance of embedded ARM devices is really a great thing for small projects. A small, passively cooled ARM computer can do most tasks that you'd have needed a 1U rackmount system for only a few years ago.

As well, they're great for learning. Bootstrapping an operating system from nothing is far, far easier on an ARM system than an Intel/x86 one.

Do you have more information or some links about OS development on ARM?

Implementing an operating system isn't that different between the main CPU architectures. I think mcpherrinm was just saying that you have to do a lot less work than for x86, for example, in order to get a minimum of functionality.

Unfortunately I don't know of any guides on implementing a toy OS on ARM. The operating systems course I've taken was a decent starting point, but it mostly deals with theory: [0].

There's also a first year ARM architecture course: [1]

Another course I've taken was about ASM programming on ARM, plus programming some simple hardware[2].

I'm not sure how useful are those materials for someone not taking the courses, but they might offer a list of things to look up somewhere else. Wikipedia actually has some good background theory.

Finally, you might look over the ARM port of EDK2[3]. EDK2 is a BSD-licensed implementation of UEFI[4]. It implements a lot of the functionality of a regular operating system, with the notable exception of multithreading. I find the source code of EDK2 to be easier to understand than the source of the Linux kernel. Probably because it is a lot more lightweight. You can run it on BealgeBoard, by the way. I'd say it's alpha quality software at the moment, so you might get some weird bugs.

Disclaimer: I'm a CS student at Manchester University and I work on EDK2.

0: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP25111/

1: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP15111/

2: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP22712/

3: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?ti...

4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Int...

Fantastic. If I understand correctly, they've switched from the teeny board (or is that a model A?) to a larger board that will be shrunk to credit card size in production, with expanded I/O, USB, HDMI, SD, 10BaseT.

Really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these.

That's interesting...any idea why? I was always under the impression the teeny USB stick device was the entire device.

The alpha boards are not going to be the same as production. These are prototypes and are a step towards a finished product.

I'd love to see an ARM based router with a decent amount of flash and RAM. Most of the current ones are MIPS based.

The reason for this is that there are a lot of interesting ARM-specific code for embedded devices, like LuaJIT and similar.

You can use one of these as a router:

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...

It has 2 ethernet jacks, wifi, and draws 5W.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, please stay away from Guru plugs.

I got three (I wanted one, boss ordered three, sigh!) of these to develop on a "ARM", when Tonido did not have enough in stock.

These sound like a small turbine. It is impossible to work with these switched on.

The earlier versions were heating up so badly and melting electronics, that the manufacturer decided to put a crappy fan inside and create a new problem.

They have another version that is silent, dreamplug.

I've been using dreamplugs. They are nicely done. They aren't tiny like a wall wart, more like a tall paper back book, but I've happily replaced all of my OpenWRT based systems and won't look back.

Get the JTAG/UART device, it will save your ass when you render the poor thing unbootable with a kernel replacement. There appears to be a network boot attempt in the power up, but I haven't seen documentation for it.

One caveat: The wifi range is ok, but not top notch, and when running as an access point it can only support 8 devices, which isn't much when people show up with a phone-ipad-laptop bag.

Is the 8 device limit a hardware or software limitation?

I think it is in the firmware loaded into the wireless hardware. I browsed through the driver source and didn't find anything to account for the limit there.

Wait, GuruPlugs have fans? I own two, and though they spend most of their time in their original packaging, I don't recall hearing any noise when I plugged them in.

I also have a SheevaPlug installed in an uncooled building that regularly exceeds 100F in the summers, and it seems to be doing fine after replacing the crappy original PSU with their updated version.

I have the guruplug server (2 network interfaces) version. Yes. they do have fans.

The Raspberry Pi site really needs a one-line blurb below the logo explaining just what it is, or failing that, a prominent "About" link. I shouldn't have to go through several blog posts, an unhelpful FAQ, etc. just to infer that a Raspberry Pi is some kind of embedded board that runs Linux, and still have no idea what CPU it uses or how fast it is.

I've got Efika-MX smart top (and there is smart book) and love them. They are not that expensive - $130 for the smartop, $200 for the smart book.

yeah, for the price of a dreamplug you can get a netbook. dreamplug are useless.

btw, did you get video acceleration on yours?

Yes, I do - it's OpenGLES2 using the imx drivers. I think it's PowerVR device. glmark2-es2 works (though I think there is an artifact with the z-buffer).

They have forums at power-developer.org - very nice bunch of folks.

It's sell Ubuntu 10.10, until they get their drivers up to 11.04, but on the site there are many other different distress, and even people experimenting with armhf (hard floating point).

openGLES is fine, i was asking more about hardware acceleration for video.

if you play a full HD video, does it skip frames like crazy? is the CPU on 100%?

I haven't tried any video on it. Check power-developer.org

The draw (pun intended) of the DreamPlug is the appliance-like form factor combined with very low power consumption. Also keep in mind that the plug computers are kind of a marketing tool to get companies to buy their custom-built ARM devices from GlobalScale. If the PogoPlug and similar plugs are any indication, at high enough volumes, it should be possible to make a profit selling a finished device for the price of a D2plug.

ETA for somebody to hack together their own handheld emulation console using a Rasberry Pi as the computing core? 6 months.

I can't remember what this is, the "home" page is a list of their recent blog posts and their FAQ is useless to anyone who doesn't know what Raspberry Pi is. How do so many people make this mistake?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com