Two million Raspberry Pi sold
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be. Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.
I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure, everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to getting started.
It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially expected.
What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.
But it is. My Pi's are running headless and I access them over Ethernet. They suck less power than a VM running on a more powerful hardware and that's the point.
edit: I admit that it's easier for Web dev than for HW dev. I'd use Arduino for HW hobbies before a Pi if the project can be done with both.
I was particularly impressed with the approach of the Getting Started with Arduino book - for artists / non-electronics / non-programmers.
This is actually how the BeagleBone Black works. Install one driver, plus it in via USB, and it's powered and networked to your computer, and a JS IDE with GPIO control is automatically loaded.
It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!
My conclusion is that Time Machine over Wifi is inherently flaky--regardless of whether the Time Machine is running on Apple hardware or not.
The main reason is any thing you can likely do on your RasPi you can also do on your Laptop. The need for a small form factor devices in production use cases always exists. But any kind of mass production requires serious application of effort to bring the price, stability and quality to a optimum point. And its an effort that spans months if you work full time.
That's too much for the ordinary web developers level of patience who expects to launch a fully functioning product over a weekend.
Mine were at first but now I have two that are both in active use, a surveillance camera and a deaddrop.
The first runs as domain controller using Samba4 for that. This was a major hazzle to setup since I needed to compile Samba4 to get it working (the one in the Debian distribution is somewhat shaky). For obvious reasons I never touch this one.
The second one runs a GIT repository and serves generally as tinkering box, such as setting up Apache for authenticating against the domain controller.
As servers, I wouldn't like to miss them.
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B679923178D2B63F22C984...
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/0A7028F6600F940D1A680A...
A single pi can push about 600 kb/s. This includes a lot of circuit requests and other encryption. Thinking of buying some more.
What happens sometimes is that there is insufficient memory. This happens if you do a lot of apt-get update and upgrade, or run other stuff. My relay just starts at boot and then does nothing else.
EDIT: I chose 600 kb/s because this means that my cpu (almost) never hits 100%, but is still pretty active.
For what I've understood, they try to increase the number of Tor relays and exit-nodes.
Their site: https://www.hartvoorinternetvrijheid.nl/eng.html A small lightening talk on OHM2013 about 'em: https://archive.org/details/D4T208201308031515HartVoorIntern...
That probably doesn't matter too much if you are building some embedded thing, but I am mostly using my Pi as a web server, and I like that is so easy to set up and configure.
I got Debian Wheezy booting off of the Black in under an hour or so. Sorry to hear you had difficulty getting it to work on yours.
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu
I own 1 rpi and 2 BBBs and all work just fine. I have the rpi 24/24h connected to a relay board and other things but tend to prefer the BBB due to the better CPU and easier to keep up to date with regular distros.
Relatively easy to get a server going on it, and lxde running as a GUI isn't too shabby (noticeably better than a GUI on the PI).
Only trouble with BBB is the lack of hardware accelerated graphics support (BBB has a graphics chip, but it's not working in any of the current kernels)
Not to be off topic, I have three Pi-B's doing local file storage, media center and on a robot platform. The ecosystem around the Pi is one of the best. A quick search will find someone doing something like your idea.
http://www.romaco.ca/blog/2013/07/05/the-cubieboard2-the-mos...
Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
Personally, I think they should wait until they can make a dual-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 with 1 GB of RAM for $25, which may be possible by 2015, and maybe a quad-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 one with 2 GB of RAM (and perhaps a few extra stuff), for under $50 (I would make it for $40-$45 so the total cost with shipping and whatnot still remains under $50 for most people, instead of going over that price point). A single core Cortex A53 at 1.5 Ghz (its stock clock speed) would be ~5x faster, and also 64-bit. By the way, Cortex A7 and Cortex A53 are both the true successors of the ARM11 CPU RPi is using, and they serve the same markets.
The $25-$50 market, is still probably their best market, since a lot more companies compete at the $100-$200 level.
They are in a great position for volume, so should be able to do better than the current choice that was suboptimal in so may ways. Not clear that the 64 bit stuff will be that cheap soon (plus porting code will take a while) but it depends when they are going to do something. Cheap is important.
My conclusion: The Raspi is slow for serving with dynamic languages. Compiled stuff is fine.
I have two odroid U2 that I use for testing distributed and multithreaded code. One odroid core (exynos 4412 @1.7GHz ) is more than 8x as fast as the pi, for some numerical simulation code (ODEs). Storage is eMMC, so should be faster than the class 10 SD card in a Pi. It was very easy to get Linaro set up on them (for headless use, as compute servers). Recommend highly.
I use my two RPi for file serving, backups via rsync and btsync, limited web (one is at a remote location).
There's a utilite pro on order as well, but they are a bit backlogged, as I understand it. I'm looking forward to the 2x Gb eth (odroid is 100Mb) and faster bus and disk speeds.
http://linuxgizmos.com http://www.cnx-software.com http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc http://www.fanlesstech.com
What I'm saying is that you could implement the equivalent of OwnCloud and CalendarServer on the Pi knowing that it needed to be memory and CPU efficient, and no doubt get 300 - 500mS responses. But that would mean not using frameworks that start by assuming you have at least 1GB of memory free and can run an interpreter (PHP) on an interpreter (JS) on the actual code.
Looking at the code for these I think the biggest issue is memory for them. A 2G Pi would probably do what you needed, trying to swap on the Pi (especially if you do that to an SD card) makes it really really slow. Its better if you can swap to an NFS mounted file system, and even cooler if you can swap to a custom memory instance in another server :-)
SI units are not capitalized unless they are someone's name, such as Pascal (pressure) or Newton (force) etc.
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100726071250/xkcd/im...
It would also be a very bad move for Raspberry to get involved with a company like Intel, and get themselves stuck with a historically abusive partner, that often tells you it's their way or the highway, like they did when they forced OEM's to buy their CPUs integrated with their GPUs, even if the OEMs already wanted to buy discrete GPUs. They're in a much better position picking a chip maker out of the dozen or so ARM chip makers.
I agree they should upgrade their chips, though, and maybe even have higher-end ones. Even now there are $200 ARM boards, which is what one that is 10-15x more powerful than Raspberry Pi would cost right now. However, I'd rather they don't split the architecture support by software vendors in 3: ARMv6(currently), ARMv7, and ARM8. I think they'd be better off just waiting it out until they are ready for ARMv8.
Is this website being fed in real-time by the RPi?
What framework/tool are you using to create the UI for your website?
Want to maintain a consistent white balance or exposure between shots? Sorry, no can do. And since it's a proprietary blob, it's not something you can fix.
My next mini-project is to build a web app that can run these midi tools and list the performances in a nice UI, so that I can control the piano with a tablet or phone on the wifi network (using something other than an SSH terminal).
I am thinking of getting a couple of other Pi's for webcam use. I had one hooked up to a cam but it kept dying for some reason. Maybe because of the cheap wifi dongle.
It's an amazing little gadget and the sky's the limit on what you can do with it.
I've been teaching a Scratch class in my local library (https://www.codeclub.org.uk/) which has also been distributing Pi's to kids and classrooms.
I'm sure there are some more verified statistics - but from an anecdotal POV, they've been a resounding success.
Something to consider is that the RPi wasn't launched into a vacuum like the earliest microcomputers were. So it won't have as profound of an impact.
At the lower grade levels, around 3rd through maybe 8th grade, Scratch seems to be a pretty big deal. Somehow, Scratch has been installed on every computer in our house, and a couple of Arduino boards arrived shortly after S4A was mentioned recently here on HN. I'd encourage Scratch in the schools before RPi.
The RPi has certainly been educational for me. I'm sure it wasn't the first, or the best, little Linux board. But in part due to hobbyist interest in it, there's a lot of good tutorial information out there, making it easy for someone like me (minimal formal training in programming and electronics) to create some pretty cool things.
Having said that, a 60" TV and surround sound receiver will probably also take a least a few watts, if I had to guesstimate :)
It would also run an rss-full-article-fetcher process I wrote but it turns out to be impossible-mission to get ghc to compile or cross-compile anything for arm.
I've found it really useful for lots of low-power bandaid solutions to various problems I have had.
But hey, they can play back video pretty OK, so I eventually settled on a mix of video and live streaming a desktop browser rendered on a normal PC:
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/hw/RaspberryPi/Streaming
Thing is, omxplayer crashes out of the blue for no apparent reason (either halts the player process or locks up the RPi _completely_, on any hardware rev) and have an alarming tendency to corrupt SD cards, so I'm moving to the Beaglebone Black ASAP.
They do make very nice low-power servers (I have one doing AirPrint via CUPS for iOS devices), though, and of course I try out a bunch of things on mine - if it runs quickly enough on a Pi, then it's blisteringly fast on a "normal" machine.
The BBB's main issue is the lack of support from TI for the graphics chip. Android is 'acceptable' on BBB, but the lack of hardware accel graphics puts a major damper on the fun (aka no youtube).
> Hosting my website (with CloudFlare in front)
> A gateway into my network (almost all ports are open to the RPi including SSH). I can ssh in and then every device on my network is configured to accept connections from it. Hitting my devices directly (over v6, for instance) would be rejected by firewalls and such.
> Personal Cloud: I use BitTorrent sync to move files around my computers. Sometimes my desktop / laptop aren't on at the same time. I solved this problem by putting BTSync on my RPi. It's online 24/7 so my files are always accessible.
> MySQL server (for development).
Ideas I have floating around:
> Possibly hosting my email
> Internal services like Squid caching.
> Server-Side Development. It's a tight environment (ram is limited, cpu is fairly slow) so it forces you to build lightweight programs. If it can run well on a RPi, it's probably fine on a VPS.
> Monitoring/graphing uptime/latency -- My router doesn't do this for me.
> Scheduling backups (possibly via rsync?)
Your RPi is basically a home server. Use it to control devices in your house and do automation.
Pi's are good for teaching you things, so if you got one you would learn with it. A number of folks have started learning about Linux system administration with theirs after being somewhat 'light weight' in that department. Others are learning about new programming languages or environments, from node.js, to R, to Scratch, to python. Getting Docker on them has had people setting up server deploys. Running web servers have people creating small web sites with bootstrap and other technologies.
But if you really aren't interested in learning those sorts of things, well its not really very useful. Everything it does can be done 'better' in a production environment by a server, usually x86 based, designed to do what ever it is it is doing.
Bottom line is there are a lot of things an RPi can help you learn by giving you hands on experience. If you're not interested in learning those things, it probably isn't all that useful.
The Pi's processor is equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium 2, and that's kinds scary.
The BBB is lacking in community support vs the rPi.
And Arduino is still very popular with a much simpler chip.
That said, like the Arduino, there are a small mix of custom-commercial uses in there, some educational where the units are purchased as part of a curriculum, and of course some 'novelty' purchases where people think "I should get one of these" and then never use it again.
So it has good penetration in the hobbiest market which, depending on who you believe is 3 to 5 million 'seats'.