Raspberry Pi

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d4mo · Post by **d4mo** » Wed May 18, 2011 6:53 pm

Has anyone else looked at this? If they actually release them at the $25 price range I will definitely be getting one. I've been looking for a low power - cheap system for awhile now and this would def fit the bill. I would like to use it a small fileserver maybe put some emulators on in or something. Would be a good print server aswell.

My only 2 Questions.

1) What would be the method of storage space? Something that will be fine to run 24/7 and can support many read/writes?

2) Being an ARM processor are we going to run into any incompatibilities with software?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Code: Select all

Provisional specification

    * 700MHz ARM11
    * 256MB of SDRAM
    * OpenGL ES 2.0
    * 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
    * Composite and HDMI video output
    * USB 2.0
    * SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
    * General-purpose I/O
    * Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)

djdunn · Post by **djdunn** » Wed May 18, 2011 7:30 pm

I cant say much about incompatibilities of the arm processor concerning software, I know ARM is fairly popular among the low power small size devices.

it doesn't say what the storage is, since your asking about supporting many read writes, your probably thinking about the limited number of read writes as a limitation of flash memory?

it does say that it does have a memory card slot, it may use that as internal storage, which would be rather slow, i have a microsd card thats multiple times slower than an IDE hard drive.

chiefbag · Post by **chiefbag** » Thu May 19, 2011 9:46 am

It has a USB port so I don't see any reason why you could not connect an external drive if you really needed to.

Anyone know when these units might be ready for production?

d4mo · Post by **d4mo** » Thu May 19, 2011 1:14 pm

The date is late 2011 I believe.

One thing I don't see mentioned is audio. It says it has HDMI so myabe it's audio over HDMI?

I could use an external harddrive, I just don't feel good about having one of those running 24/7. They just don't seem like they would last long. Has flash memory gotten any better with read/writes? Would I even come close to hitting the limit? I mean, I guess when you think about it, android phones are flash based, and things get changed all the time on there. But probably not as many as a file server. A gentoo server at that.

djdunn · Post by **djdunn** » Fri May 20, 2011 3:42 am

yeah flash memory has gotten better about read and writes than it used to be but its a problem thats not going away. It can be really fast if you need it to be and if your worried about trying to compile on it... not sure why you would want to compile on an arm but... you can mount a ramdisk and compile in ram.

one thing though about the android phones is that your writing a lot fewer times than you read. On my android im not normally making lots of changes to the system, most things get installed once and each app that you download is really just 1 file. and most of my app stuff gets put on the microSD card anyways cause i only got like 160meg or something of room anyways.

And phones have a reletively short life especially with people shelling out money for smart phones. the technology is going to advance quickly and i have long ago accepted that my phones not really gonna change much until i get a new phone. which is gonna happen way faster than sprint will ever get around to upgrading my software to gingerbread.

I think flash is viable for an OS as long as your not trying to compile on it. And for 25$ you cant really complain. But you cant even begin to attempt to even estimate a systems number of read/writes.

depending on the age quality of the chip of the flash you could be anywhere from 10,000 writes to over 1 million before you see failure, where 10,000 writes would be writing to every available sector 10,000 times. newer flash chips now dont always write to the same parts of the chip they spread them out so you could last much much longer if your only using say 5% of your flash chip at any one time you could make 200,000 writes min on a 10,000 write limit chip. if you only ever use at most 5% of its capacity. but the more you use it the lower its capacity would be as sectors go bad and shut down.

however if the flash chip does reach the write limit. it doesn't mean that it will "die" you just can no longer write to it, but you will be able to read it fine, rather in theory you will be able to read it fine.

so if your just running services and your not logging or saving anything, or making any changes, a flash chip could last many many years.

d4mo · Post by **d4mo** » Fri May 20, 2011 1:51 pm

I see what you are saying. Good read, thanks,

Is there a reason why you wouldn't want to compile on an ARM? I would think that you would be even more likely to compile to an ARM because if you were to find prebuilt binaries chances are they won't be for ARM so you would have to compile from source. At least that is my thinking on it.

djdunn · Post by **djdunn** » Fri May 20, 2011 8:30 pm

its a low power chip and not all that fast, your probably better off cross compiling for it

chris... · Post by **chris...** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:50 pm

The new version contains LAN 2xusb HDMI, compiste video and analog 2 channel audio
The SD card is used as the main drive
On the raspberry pi website they have some nice demos
This contain similar hardware to the roku 2

gasparov · Post by **gasparov** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 11:58 am

should be out November 2011, 35$ for the version with 256 Ram.

SoC: Broadcom BCM2835 media processor system-on-chip featuring:
CPU core: ARM1176JZF-S ARM11 core clocked at 700MHz; ARM VFP.
GPU core: a Broadcom VideoCore GPU providing OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG 1.1, Open EGL, OpenMAX and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. There are 24 GFLOPS of general purpose compute and a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure. Eben worked on the architecture team for this and the Raspberry Pi team are looking at how they can make some of the proprietary features available to application programmers
DSP core: There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point)
RAM: 128MiB (Model A) or 256MiB (Model B) of SDRAM. The RAM is physically stacked on top of the Broadcom media processor (package-on-package technology)
J1: DC Jack (6-20v input provisionally)
J2: UART serial console (debug)
J3: SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot (underside)
J4: HDMI connector providing HDMI 1.3a out
J5 or J9: GPU JTAG (ARM11 pinout; no-fit on production boards)
J6: Audio connector: 3.5mm stereo jack
J7: Composite Video connector: RCA
J8: Either 1x USB 2.0 (Model A) or LAN9512 (Data Brief | Data Sheet) providing 10/100Mb Ethernet and 2x USB 2.0 (J10: Model B)
J10: 10/100Mb RJ45 Ethernet jack
J11, J14: 1.27mm header providing ~16 GPIOs at 3v3, I2C and SPI interfaces and ARM JTAG.
J12: 1.27mm header providing DSI interface
J13: 1.27mm header providing MIPI CSI-2 interface

Board size: Credit-card or smaller.
Weight: <40g? (Alpha board weighs ~55g[1])
Currently 6 layer PCB; target: 4 layer

I don't really know what you can do with it but surely is fun for 35$. Maybe a stupid question but do you think it could work as a small htpc?

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 1:39 pm

thank guys this is really a very interresting harware, and the prize looks unreal.

chris... · Post by **chris...** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 2:11 pm

gasparov wrote:J1: DC Jack (6-20v input provisionally)

Its going to be USB powered

Post by **John R. Graham** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 2:22 pm

How do you figure? USB provides 5v.

- John

Flurp · Post by **Flurp** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 3:28 pm

The micro USB power connector was announced on the Raspberry Pi website last week:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=260

gasparov · Post by **gasparov** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 8:50 pm

6 am GMT tomorrow, they'll probably sell some of the first batch.

There must be something wrong in people that do these things at 6 am, I'm definitely not gonna set my alarm clock for this

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/716

gasparov · Post by **gasparov** » Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:14 am

It seems that Farnell and RS had them but now they are sold out, RS let you express interest for the product and they will ship at the end of the week based on that list.

model B for now, the one with ethernet port and 2 usb.

Post by **John R. Graham** » Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:28 pm

Apparently it is sold out. All I was able to do was "register my interest". Brass ring goes to the first one of us that gets Gentoo to boot.

- John

destroyedlolo · Post by **destroyedlolo** » Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:39 pm

Hello,

I expressed also my interest and I'm also realy incline to install Gentoo on it probably by cross compiling even if its hardware is so slower than my current environment (AMD 1.1 Athlon).

So I would appreciate to got any feedbacks

Bye

Laurent

Post by **xaviermiller** » Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:52 pm

Hello,

I registered too. It will be the small brother of my Pandaboard. I'm curious to see it working on audio applications, this board could be a BOMB with an Arduino...

jesnow · Post by **jesnow** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 2:12 pm

We don't have to wait for hardware to set up the cross-compilation environment. I know how to do this in principle, but the specific steps for this setup are beyond me. Anybody already done it? In principle you should be able to build an ssd on your desktop machine and just pop it into the pi and boot.

Tips? Config files already made?

I'd like to build a roku-like device that reads my video collection from the server.
And a low-power server to feed it.
And a low-power desktop I can switch off when not in use.

The whole reason I switched to gentoo was in order to use the VIA epia, which was cutting edge weird stuff then.

jon

jesnow · Post by **jesnow** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 2:19 pm

Manufacturing hiccup (posted today):

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/781

andrewwalker27 · Post by **andrewwalker27** » Tue Mar 13, 2012 4:12 pm

Supposed to be delivered at end of the month, a colleague managed to order one from Farnell and I registered with RS so not long to wait!

pgu · Post by **pgu** » Sat May 05, 2012 2:05 pm

Did anybody get Gentoo running on the RPi? Currently I've only seen Debian and a couple of others available for the RPi. Did anybody get u-boot or some other network capable boot loader running on their RPi?

dattaway3 · Post by **dattaway3** » Sat May 05, 2012 8:48 pm

pgu wrote:Did anybody get Gentoo running on the RPi? Currently I've only seen Debian and a couple of others available for the RPi. Did anybody get u-boot or some other network capable boot loader running on their RPi?

I've compiled gentoo on my Sheeva with the SD card (slow but it works!) I'm sure the RPi is not much different, if at all. Look for the embedded ARM stage tarballs.

My expected ship date is in August of this year...

Kuhndog86 · Post by **Kuhndog86** » Mon May 07, 2012 8:12 pm

Just got my Pi this morning. I have some school work to finish up this week, but once that's done it'll be time to fire up the compiler.

jannis · Post by **jannis** » Fri May 11, 2012 6:55 pm

Hi there. Got mine today, too and got Gentoo running. Did an stage3 install with armv6j-stage from the arch linux image. Now I'm trying to move to hardfloat. Is this possible or is it like going from x86 to amd64 which is not directly possible?