News Raspberry Pi 2 launches with quad-core ARMv7 chip

I know the feeling - I had a Due that burned up from a 12V source too. The "native" USB port still works but the programming port is fried. Not sure why the programming port died and nothing else, but that's how it went.

I think the problem is amps, not volts. I had an ARM board that operated at 5v and when I used a computer PSU the power regulator burned up even though it was a constant 5v source. I soldered something to override the power regulator and the device started working fine after that. Anyway, most arduinos only need a few hundred milliamps to operate.

 

I care, thank you!

Precisely. USB3, SATA, Gb ethernet, none of these things are really compatible with low cost and low power.

 

£5 might not be a lot if you're only buying one, but if you're buying a few [the rPi was aimed at schools after all], an extra £5 per device adds up...

Plus if you wanted those features, chances are you've already bought the Banana Pi...

 

I honestly thought it was the other way round - aimed at schools and caught on with tinkerers. Rather than aimed at tinkerers and caught on with schools.

 

I'd suspect there's very little profit in the Banana Pi, potentially even a loss leader. There's probably very little profit in the Pi too (4.5 million sold certainly helps with that), but the Banana Pi is (likely) designed and (very likely) made in China, so it's easy to achieve savings there. They're probably buying the parts down the road in a Shenzen market and carrying them up to the factory on foot!

Knowing that the majority of the production of Raspberry Pi boards is done just down the road in Pencoed gives me warm and fuzzies, even if the individual components are all imported from China.

I thought the original goal was to get a disposably cheap computer into the hands of kids who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it? I remember reading comments from Eben at one point that said they didn't initially anticipate the interest from the hacker/maker market, but it is a fair point to say that that market drove (and still drives) a hell of a lot of sales.

 

Imo, that point became moot then they announced compute module. Also, without geek interest there wouldn't be such an active software development and rpi would have died a long time ago

Then comparing rpi2 to odroid-c1 (wich costs £3 more, but has a faster cpu/gpu/ram, proper gig Ethernet, rtc, 2x usb), rpi2 looses in everything but camera and analog video output. Hell, odroid supports more codecs and doesn't need you to buy licences for any of them.

 

I was about to say the same thing. I thought the original RPi board was really just a bunch of ATMega chips crammed together (but then that project was abandoned after they realized Broadcom's chip was better, cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient).

 

I know the idea of the initial production run was to get it out there in the hands of people who could write the software, but I didn't know that they had initially planned to revise the hardware design. It did strike me as odd that something so sensitive as the GPIO pins would be left exposed like that.

I do sometimes wish I hadn't been such an early adopter; my Pi is one of the very early ones (probably not one of the first 10k, but very close to it) and has the power supply niggles that plagued early models. Though I never had enough of a use for it to consider replacing it when the various revisions were released...

 

The biggest gripe I had with the Pi was the ethernet performance. It topped around 40-ish mbits.
I see the Pi 2 uses the same USB-hub-ethernet the Pi B+ had, the SMSC LAN9514
This probably means ethernet performance is identical, doesn't it?

 

That sounds quite good.
I wonder what the actual real-world performance is when transferring a big file through CIFS to a ramdrive. Having 1 GB of ram now, it would be possible to create a sizable ramdrive, say 500 MB, share it through Samba and write to it from another host. A 400 MB file would be big enough to achieve a meaningful figure for sustained traffic.

 

Tempted to buy one, put it inside a keyboard and throw Risc OS at it. Closest thing to an Amiga.

 

Be careful of newit. They sell fake sdcards.

EDIT:It was my mistake, this is not true.

 

It would have been great if Microsoft just opened the desktop. When it was jailbroken I had software like Audacity and Paint.Net running on it, with Rainmeter adorning the desktop. It was perfect: an Office capable hybrid tablet laptop with really good battery life. Then Windows 8.1 update came along and Microsoft broke the jailbreak, thus significantly gimping its functionality again. Because that's what Microsoft does: create decent products, and then gimp them for some cynical commercial boardroom decision which inevitably backfires on them. Every. ****ing. Time.

 

Or 'here's this awesome thing... what do you mean you want to buy one?... lol we're not going to sell it to you...'

*cough*Zune*cough*

 

Yeah. Zune = iPod killer. Let's create this awesome .MP3 player with a beautiful interface, and one of the best accompanying desktop applications, but then not sell it outside the US. And then when it becomes a success despite our best efforts, let's can it, and lay off the talent pool just before we try again with X-Box Music.