Introducing Raspberry Pi B+

Right now it's possible to back feed power with a powered hub instead of using the micro USB connection. I'd like to see the schematic to find out if that's still possible, but I can't find one yet.

plus better mounting.

I'm still missing a normal round power plug, as the ramshackly micro USB draws much more power then the allowed 500mA.

Also Ethernet is still connected via USB, and horrible slow.

-You can now provide up to 1.2 AMP to the 4 USB ports enabling you to connect more power hungry USB devices without needing an external USB hub. (This feature requires a 2Amp micro USB Power Supply)

Nice. In my experience, using a good power supply for the pi (instead of cheap ones selling for 5 bucks on ebay) is mandatory also in the current revision, and solves a lot of problems with video and USB devices (for example, cellular modems).

The Apple iPad charger works wonders.

This is quite the impressive release. The additional USB ports are a welcome addition, as-is the additional GPIO. I have one project in particular that will benefit from the additional GPIO.

The microSD slot is also a big deal. microSD's are much more common now-days than SD's due to most people's phones having them. I own a slew of old mSD's from old phones and can re-purpose them into a Pi project now :)

Current != power. I recommend altering this to say "uses less power (600mA at X volts) than the old (750mA at Y volts)," filling in X and Y with the voltage that the systems run at.

Or: "uses less power(X mW) than the old one (Y mW)," filling in X and Y wit hthe power that the systems run at.

Have them fixed the broken USB system? (USB and Ethernet share the same bus problem)

We need an "(up|down)vote but derail/off-topic" button. Upvoted anyway.

They hired him to create an open source driver, not to open source the current one.

My biggest gripe with the Pi is a lack of proper USB power, so if you add all the stuff you need, especially for a wireless setup it's not so cheap and compact anymore. I'm happy that they've (hopefully) fixed the USB power problem, that makes it much nicer as a platform.

Happen to know of any that accept the rPi camera, or an equivalent camera?

The Rpi is now a totally open source platform though, unlike the Odroid. Same for the Novena laptop.

Also, I've heard bad things about the Odroid's stability under load. Do you have any problems? I've also definitely had problems with the Rpi under load, but I expect the new switching power supply to solve that.

It already runs RISCOS ;)

Well if that's the plan, then I'm looking forward to seeing how small they can make the Raspberry Pi Master Compact.

Eventually there will be a Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi.

Let's hope it handles tail recursion.

Well, it is British, it's ARM, and it's sold by (among others) Element 14.

I agree, and bet it would also reduce power consumption even further because of higher efficiency. Does anyone know if they use the USB bus because of the space constraints?

Could you explain why would it be better for you?

What's the implication of being on the same bus? More CPU usage for ethernet?

Does the chipset support a "real" bus?

Which bus exactly? Reading the BCM2835 datasheet ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM283... ) the chip has a couple of UARTS, 2 SPI interfaces and a USB interface.

The only interface that can do DMA is the USB one. All the others have relatively small FIFO buffers and require the CPU to do all the I/O work. So you could attach an ethernet interface to one of the SPI buses, or bit bang a few GPIOs but surely the CPU load is going to be painful?

Edit: Oh wait, there's a main SPI bus that can do DMA as well. See page 148 on the doc linked above. If you can find a suitable chipset & driver then have at it :)

I agree and it isn't just the RPi that is like this... it's every board based on an ARM SoC that was designed for a mobile device like a smart phone.

"This isn’t a “Raspberry Pi 2″, but rather the final evolution of the original Raspberry Pi. "[1]

I think we can interpret this as RPI 2 will be released soon with a new processor.

1 - http://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/#introducing-raspberry-pi-mo...

Slow and proprietary, which is not a great combination... there's a lot of interesting new ARM SoCs from China that are coming out, like the Allwinner A3x series (quad A7s, >1GHz). It would be pretty unlikely for one of those to show up in the next Pi though; if anything, it'll probably be another Broadcom.

I personally feel like this is the core "feature" of the raspberry pi - the fixed "constraints" of its specs.

Constraints are good.

Fortunately there are many inexpensive alternatives to the raspberry pi (probably thanks to it) if you really do need more CPU power.

"communicate with the device over the same USB that powered it." That's the biggest issue with the RPi and they still haven't fixed it…

Given that it's a USB plug powering the device, I doubt it, although maybe the lower power usage by the Pi might provide some extra overhead.

Not sure if this is the case since they announced "reduced power consumption" ?

The question IIRC is if the new model will request high amperage from USB ports that can provide it, allowing more peripherals.

It's nothing to do with the voltage, USB is always 5v. It's about the current these ports can draw, which is 1.2A for the 4 (i.e. 0.3A each if all 4 are under load)

They'd probably piss off a lot of their developer community if they didn't keep the B in production. There's a huge number of third-party cases and projects that are built around the original connector arrangement.

Sure, why not? It runs the Quake 3 client rather well actually.

I think that the fuller quote "the final evolution of the original Raspberry Pi" is important. The word "original" in there doesn't lead me to believe they are at the end of the road overall, just end of the road for this one design.

To clarify, I expect to see a more complete redesign in the not-too-distant future. If nothing else, you want to use components that are recent so you can keep producing more of them without increased costs for legacy components.

> Even if you pick an open source friendly SoC vendor like TI, there are currently no GPU designers for these SoCs that have open source drivers. It is unlikely improvemants can be made in that area that anytime soon.

Intel looks pretty good, current gen tablet SOC and followons have i915 lineage GPUs. Bay/Cherry Trail.

AMD too, current tablet SOCs and upcoming ARM models.

There are also reverse engineering efforts at various stages for Mali, Adreno, Tegra. Tegra even has some fledgling vendor support.

That would make the http://www.broadcom.com/products/Applications-and-Multimedia... the obvious choice.

The Galileo has some interesting caveats, like a much slower CPU than even the Raspberry Pi and the GPIO, PWM, etc going through an IO expander chip on the really slow I2C bus. (Apparently there's a Rev2 with some native GPIO pins now, presumably not compatible with the Rev1 unless you use Intel's official abstraction layers.)

For many people, the "useless" composite video RCA is what allows them to use the Pi. It's a great way to repurpose an old TV you have laying around.

Yes. Same as the iPod can have composite video and two audio channels. Three ring / four section plugs.

The Pi makes a fantastic media center when combined with XBMC.

Raspbmc. Works brilliantly.

There are lots of little embedded projects the Pi is great for, check out this for some inspiration: https://learn.adafruit.com/category/raspberry-pi

The compute module itself does not include a USB/Ethernet chip, so only has the BCM's single USB.

Have you tried another power supply? I used a "high quality" one from RS (I think) and had odd problems with disk corruption and crashes when pushing the limits. I switched to a old iPad charger and the crashing problems went away.

This is a little cheaper, but not $35: http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-mod...

> Not sure what projects needed more pins but not complaining.

The added pins include a couple of important ones from the SoC that were previously not available, or were only available on a secondary connector. You can now get JTAG over the expansion port, for instance.

It has extremely good 3D acceleration, provided you're not unreasonably upset by using binary drivers. You can now get fairly good results with the open source ones too (30fps Quake3).

I run the PiPlay (piplay.org) project. It can run PSX games VERY well. Most at full speed.

-Shea

I used it to serve files via http, and it was very poor at it. I would not recommend using it as an http file server. Light application use, or for things like hosting git repositories works well though.

If your site will serve only few static pages and you going to have less as 500 unique daily visitors RPi should be fine. But if you run some heavy framework like Wordpress and will have more as one visitor at once RPi cant handle.

Tried, but can't do any heavy stuff.

I'm running my girlfriends portfolio page on a Pi, nginx + mysql + php / Wordpress with a caching plugin. Works quite well if the pages are cached (which most are), admin stuff is quite slow.

I am running a web server on mine using PipaOS and Lighttpd, but I rewrote my database system to SQLite instead of MySQL. Granted, this meant I had to reimplement some stored procedures that I had written in PHP instead (for parent/child page traversal and navigation building) but it returns pages much faster. I know that reading from a file all the time is likely to harm the attached USB drive's read count, but I'm not getting many hits!

I intend to rewrite the system using C++ instead (using an old Mongoose C++ web server edition) and load the SQLite database into SQLite :memory: (without a disk backup) instead, which means that it'll return pages much faster; it'll only touch the "disk" database on program startup.

I see from the others that they have put PHP and MySQL and a host of other things on theirs but for simple sites, that is probably somewhat overkill.

I also use mine as an SSH gateway.

Ive used it to run an openvpn client on which connected/bridged two WiFis over internet and forwarded igmp packets and multicast (not broadcast). Worked fine, so that my DLNA (minidlna) server could be reached and play movies on a Samsung smart tv as if the minidlna server was on the same wifi as the tv, but it was in fact in another city.

Streaming HD movies in this way - flawlessly. 30mbit up/down conneciton on the minidlna+openvpn server, and 24mbit down 1mbit up ASDL on the Samsung tv receiving end.

My RPI number 2 runs owncloud+nginx and Bittorrent sync. Well it's not fast but i can live with it. PHP-APC helped a lot.

I am running nginx on my RPi at http://pi.tafkas.net/

No :(

You can probably do it via a USB dongle with the new ports added.

I don't believe there is an ADC on the board -- adding an input would have added a bit of cost.

I have a Mic to USB for my audio-input needs.

In theory you could use the I2S, but I went the easy route and hooked up a USB DAC (Behringer UCA-202 - good cheap DAC). Thanks to Pi's USB issues, you need to switch to USB low speed (dwc_otg.speed=1), but it's worked well.

I'd be surprised if they did. Netflix doesn't have a Linux client, and the only way to get it running on desktop Linux is using Wine with custom patches. Seeing as Wine depends on the CPU being x86, this method won't work.

Minority use with expensive requirements => very unlikely to happen.

I can run python on it. Yes, I'm aware of http://www.pymcu.com/index.html , but they're cheap enough for projects and familiar enough for people vaguely familiar with Linux that it ends up being a good combination for lots of fun projects. It's probably overkill for >90% of things people use it for, but usability is the big advantage.

My understanding is that the Raspberry Pis are intended to be used in education. The front page says: "We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn how computers work, how to manipulate the electronic world around them, and how to program."

That said, I use mine as a simple NAS for backups.

Running Linux in embedded projects is still super useful. You can use pretty advanced software like speech recognition (PocketSphinx, etc.), image processing (OpenCV), and more to make cool stuff that would be miserable/nearly impossible to implement bare metal on a fast CPU. Even networking heavy or UI heavy projects would be much easier on a machine that runs a real operating system.

I built my own home security system with a Pi as the brains to control camera streaming and do face recognition using OpenCV. Is there a $5 microcontroller that can do all that? Admittedly, it's a big load on the Pi and I'm looking for more powerful single board computers, but that again eliminates $5 MCUs.

I have another Pi working as a drop-in replacement wifi router that routes data via a USB data dongle in case my main internet connection fails. This too may be too much to ask from a $5 MCU.

I don't have the Raspberry Pi, mainly because, since I develop embedded software for a living, I have an endless supply of development boards I can hack on at work and am free to take home (during those evenings when I am not so fucking tired of flipping bits that I don't even want to SEE C code!), but:

* A platform with less legacy crap than x86 is wonderful for learning about OS development. I don't know how the Pi fares for this, with Broadcom's chip and all, but if I had the free time to hack an OS in my spare time, not dealing with all the thirty year-old cruft nor shedding a gazillion EUR on a PowerPC system would be ideal.

* There's a legitimate audience of visual artists, musicians or just tinkerers who, as outrageous as might sound to us, long-bearded bit twiddlers, find learning anything other than Python either hopelessly complicated or just not refreshing enough. Aye, their needs would be better served by a 5-dollar MCU, but when an extra twenty dollars buying you the ability to write the code on the same computer that runs it, it's hard to resist. I find myself breaking the sacred oath of not using even one bit more than I need, too, because it's Saturday and my cat wants some attention too and I derive far more pleasure from seeing the jukebox playing music than from knowing the half-done file loader module that will eventually be part of a jukebox eighteen Saturdays from now on is so optimized that even an optimizing compiler would slash its veins in envy.

* The "cheap webserver" part is generally useful when you actually want one to interface something with the outside world over the Interwebs. I find the idea of using HTTP for much of this rather... repugnant, but there are people to whom it isn't, and a VPS isn't of much use if the requirement is to toggle this relay in response to that HTTP request.

My colleague uses it to run a python script to periodically download and store virtual currency prices. As I understand it, it is useful if you want to download stuff from the internet in certain time intervals.

I've been using a Pi running XBMC for about a year. It's connected to a big hard drive. I can copy stuff there from my laptop (movies, music, etc.) It works pretty well; I don't remember having to "service" it in any way since I plugged it in.

It works fine to stream stuff from YouTube, too. Shows for kids, etc. The XBMC remote on my phone is pretty handy too.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

I have one which I use as a VPN terminator for the office.

The use case of the Pi is a computer that can be given to small children to be theirs, to be a counterpart to the BBC Micro of thirty years ago.

It's also an attempt to get right what the OLPC people got wrong (too expensive, too different from all other systems).

It has to have a decent display, which really rules out microcontrollers (an early prototype was indeed an AVR that ran Lua and output composite video). It has to be cheap, and indeed it is cheaper than all the other full-fledged Linux boards with larger processors and more RAM.

I made a home heating controller with temp plotting and frost alarm out of a couple of Pis.

I don't think a $5 microcontroller would have run a tiny web server, tiny email server, or the plotter code that forms the core of the project.

The Pi is a fine budget Linux computer. It's not fast, it's not powerful, it's not expensive.

But it's fast enough and powerful enough for embedded applications you can put online without breaking a sweat.

Here are a couple of use cases:

- Stick it on the back of your 3D printer and run OctoPrint on it to give a nice web interface for your 3D printer (and a web cam for time lapse capture).

- Connect it to my digital piano to record playing sessions and upload the MIDI files automatically to dropbox without me having to push any buttons except the "on" button on the piano.

There are a thousand other use cases where you want something more than a microcontroller, you just have to use your imagination!

I'm currently putting together a data recorder for an academic experiment. It requires: GPS, Camera, Environmental data, inclinometer, and a few other odd bits. I could build up a custom system, but that is a big NRE expense for something that less than ten of will probably ever be produced. I could also use a "better" but less common developer board, but that path has its own problems. The experimenter could have stuck with a COTS solution, but the reason that I'm working on it now is the inconvenience and poor quality of the current implementation (lots of COTS stuff bodged together). Currently, they are using a lot of COTS stuff, and then putting the data together in batches. Even though it is a somewhat automated process, it remains slow, labor-intensive, tedious, fragile, etc. When I am done, I get to hand off an integrated, fully automated system that is flexible, built with easily replaceable parts, and best of all; due to the abundance of freely shared examples and documents, a grad student, or even an ambitious undergrad can take over and manage or even customize the system. Also, the rPi based system is much cheaper than the current system.

So, there is one pretty good use for an rPi.

It's a valid question, not sure why you're being down voted. It nicely fills the use case of "I could totally run this project from an 80 cent microcontroller, except that it needs network connectivity, and the only practical way to do that in my environment is with 802.11 or 802.3."

The Raspberry Pi designers made a bunch of, IMHO, totally bone-headed design decisions early on (e.g., RTC "costs too much", but let's throw on a bunch of expensive ZIF connectors for overpriced peripherals that nobody will use) and the B+ is a move in the right direction to fix that.

My use case is "wifi terminal server." Which is to say that I built a battery-powered RPi system to connect Sky Safari on my iPad to a go-to telescope. The official Sky Safari wifi peripheral is $180 and can't even act as an access point! With the RPi, I have a better uart bridge (in that it runs hostapd) for one third the cost of the official solution. Plus, there is the possibility of adding auto-guiding using the gpio pins and some hacking.