Hardware Raspberry Pi: the modder's dream machine?

Ahh, thats it, but still it has a lot of capabilites ^.^

I was talking to Dweller last night, and I'm certain that this will open the door for the likes of Asus a Gbyte.

Would be brilliant if we started to see boards like these from them, but more powerfull..

 

that's what I'll probably do with it : Rpi + USB touchscreen + USB DAC

 

That is nice & cheap, not interested in programming but I'll very likely get 1 of these to make a super portable crazy low power XBMC .

Micro modding if I have time to do 1 this year I will will be crazy making a case for something so small .

I'm pretty sure it's more powerful than my first PC which was an AMD 700hmz single core & 35 times cheaper & about 500 or a heck of a lot more times smaller what is not to like.

Tried Linux before briefly & quite like it but it's biggest perk is it's freeeeee & so is XBMC .

 

i'm surprised about the amount of people willing to use linux here. i hope they realize that windows CE is not supported.

being a long term extensive linux user, i'm excited about this and i intend to install debian on it and do extensive robotics development on it.

as for the guy wanting visual studio - seriously? visual studio is not that good. there are linux based programs such as geany or kate that i find just as good but without the bloat. obviously this depends on the language you use but new versions of visual studio are very bloated and older ones lack features.

just because theres a small, cheap computer on the market, it doesn't mean you're supposed to get it. i think a lot of people are going to end up buying this and get disappointed. i've noticed a lot of people here act like 4gb of ram is required for gaming and bash AMD like it's their job. if you're one of these people, you are not going to like RPi.

 

That was engadget, reckoned on balance of capability it could be more potent than iphone 4s and tegra 2 I think, custom broadcom chip this time showing that Mhz is not everything.

 

Well, no, Linux has lots of devel tools. Most of them are very far from nice. Most of the "devel tools" on Linux are indistinguishable from a text editor (although, to be fair, quite a lot of linux is indistinguishable from a text editor...)

Much as people like to promote it as such, the idea that linux is in any way friendly or easy to get into as a brand-new software engineer is absolute fantasy.

P

 

Nice article. Liked the (unusually) detailed article. Thanks Bit-Tech!! Respect

People who complained about how rubbish this board is... I compared it to the price I paid for a commercial PIC programming board and PIC's. The PI is competative in this market.

@The folk with dumb Windows and MS Visual Studio comments. Linux tools like Qt Creator are free for non-commercial use. How much does a Visual Studio license cost these days? One word for ya - "duh".

Notice that no one commented that UK Plc. is completely screwed... When UK-based companies are actually charged extra to "try" and produce products in this country. Never mind the salary+benefits overheads they would incur anyway... ARGGGG!!

 

I think the PI + arduino combo will make a lovely couple ...

 

I gather you haven't used Linux in a while, because what you said is the stereotypical Linux, or what Linux was like from 2006 and earlier.

+1 @ bobwya

 

Unfortunately, at the moment, it is not possible to support direct storage (SATA) or PCI/e. USB3 could be added, but note that the actual bandwidth available is only really enough for USB 2 (hence why it has the USB2 ports and 10/100 ethernet.

Even then, the USB2 and ethernet are shared. We are yet to see what effect it has, reading off the network (for media playback, say 20 to 40Mbs for Bluray) and accessing the USB port at the same time. But so long as you are not trying to push too much through the USB, its looking like network performance is stable enough.

I also really like the idea of putting the RPi inside the receiver. I have a Sony system with a large central Sub and I am sure there will be space in that plus plenty of power.


In terms of power - 5V at 700mA is enough to run the device and display. However 1A is 'preferred' and you should be looking at more than that if you want to run bus powered USB / 2 devices. So a 2A 5V power supply would be the perfect solution.

Solar power - actually need a fairly big panel to supply 5V 1A, but, what is not known is how much the board will consume without the display being used. But with a storage battery and maybe a 1.5 or 2A panel and you could have a self sustained field station for monitoring.

Clustering / Render farm - The GPU has reasonable power, the CPU doesnt. At the moment, there is no GPGPU available, so how ever many of these you tie together (yes even 10,000!!) it would be extremely inefficient and not a supercomputer. However, a small cluster would provide a great resource for learning parrallel programming, cluster set up and monitoring etc...

Car media and/or monitoring - as mentioned in the article, there is a Car Media project running (well as soon as the RPi ships!) as well as talk of turning it in to a car monitoring device that hooks up via the car data port in modern cars


Would be great support for the project if Bit-Tech supported (not monetary more exposure) a project of two.

 

You might want to watch out for magnet interference if you put it in the sub. I am not sure how much of an effect it would have, but having a large magnet moving within 20 cm's of it is probably not the best performance enhancer.

 

Will the ethernet capable version be able to stream lovefilm and netflix through the browser?

 

Just what I was thinking

 

Truth

 

uh.... unless you misquoted, i never said that. i actually argued AGAINST that.

 

I beg to disagree - at my university, we're taught Java development from the very beginning within a Linux environment. They cover all the basics and use the bash shell as much as possible. The initial text editor is nedit, though they also strongly encourage you to use vim a bit later on (which has awesome support for scripts and configs, and integrates well with Eclipse through a script). If a bunch of freshers straight out of school (many with no prior programming experience) can develop comfortably in Linux within a couple of months, then anyone can.

 

With a dedicated XBMC port I'll probably pick up 2-3 of them.

Really like the idea of having it mounted inside the 5.1 receiver.
Might have to see if there is much room in the lounge room LCD to fit one...

I have a feeling we are likely to see quite a number of awesome mods with this in Bit-tech come the launch date.

 

You and I are on the same brainwave.....

 

As a student taking a degree in Computer Science, I can't wait to get my hands on this. as I have no doubt that my programming skills will be improved by messing around with it! I will likely purchase more than one. One for messing around with. One to be used as a NAS and another for XMBC.