Raspberry Pi computer review | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi computer review

bbc.co.uk

45 pointsahjones14 comments

I didn't know the Pi ships with the Blender Foundation's awesome animated cartoon Big Buck Bunny (http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/) on the SD card. Cool! It makes me wonder how well it would actually run Blender though, and if there are ARM binaries available?

The latest builds listing at http://builder.blender.org/download/ doesn't include any.

There are blender packages in the ARM debian repository, so you should be able to get it to build on Fedora, too. Another issue is whether it'll run: I think Blender uses OpenGL/GLX for rendering, and I don't know if that works on the RPi. OpenGL ES 2.0 is supposedly supported by the hardware, but I don't know if and how that is supported in Linux userspace, particularly as OpenGL ES is mostly a subset of OpenGL. Software rendering might suffice though.

> "Software rendering might suffice though."

If I understand correctly, if it's using Mesa it should software render what it has to and hardware render the rest, without needing to change the program itself?

Yes, unless it makes specific demands on the OpenGL implementation which Mesa's software renderer can't meet. By "suffice" I was mainly thinking of performance. I don't know if Mesa is optimised for ARMv6 at all, and how demanding Blender is in this regard.

See the very impressive work on BlenderPocket by Salvatore Russo a number of years ago http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/blender-...

That's proof it can be done! I did drop him an email to see if he was still active in this area and interested in updating his work for the Pi. He sadly doesn't have time, but is happy to give advice or pointers as he is able to. I also see there's a GSoC project regarding blender and GL ES, but I think it's targeted at the game engine rather than the actual creation tools.

If you know anyone interested, do get in touch.

D'oh! I had forgotten about BlenderPocket, thanks for reminding me.

> The website where it was offered for sale crashed

Still can't order in certain countries

And is it me or why didn't they put the links to buy?

http://www.farnell.com/

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/

It's the BBC, they're explicitly not allowed to by their charter.

This would make an interesting little server if has the processing power for that. Maybe with a big SD card, it could be a little portable Git server?

It has more than enough power for home server level tasks.

I was fast, lucky, and able to wake up at 0-dark-30 in the morning to order and I currently have it running ArchLinux and using 4 USB webcams to detect motion and lock in to take facial-area screenshots using both Motion and OpenCV+Python. This weekend, I plan on testing out the Kinect libraries.

I have a 7000maH battery on order from Amazon to be able to make it portable and easily chargeable which I hope to get 8 hours of off the grid battery life out of.

If you don't need the video, audio, GPIO, or the long wait time for the batches to fill current orders, a comparable product at low cost would be the PogoPlug. http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-provideov3

This is pretty amazing stuff! Do you have a blog where you post the details?

Only 2 programming languages installed? I doubt it!

They're the two that make the most sense to expose the most, given their mission. I'd be surprised if it didn't also have gcc at a minimum.

I'd also be very surprised if gcc wasn't there. I'd like to think people are taught what pointers are and how they can be used to make data structures. Educate people about the dangers, but don't be scared!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com