The Raspberry Pi Turns One 81
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday. Raspberry Pi was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year, with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; a 512 MB RAM upgrade; the launch of a Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of the Minecraft Pocket Edition."
Re: Obsolete Processor (Score:5, Interesting)
"The ARM was snuck into 2835 as a bit of skunkworks from Eben, who had these wild ideas about the general public being able to buy a breakout board for our chip and program it themselves. Sounded great to me, but far-fetched."
You are right about the chip, the Roku 2 media players all use the Broadcom BCM2835.
I bought a couple... (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a couple just to play around with on the home network.
I am using one as an XBMC player in the kids room. It works fine, no problems. Surprising, considering how underpowered it is compared to the Atom-based computers I'm using elsewhere to run XBMC.
The other I am using as a fileserver. It's not set up in a RAID, but it gets quite good performance. So good, in fact, that I am using it for daily use to serve media throughout the house instead of the Netgear ReadyNas Duo that I originally bought for the job. (The Raspberry Pi has better throughput on both reads and writes when using ssh protocol. It also supports hard drives over 2TB.)
As a plus, I'm now completely comfortable dealing with a headless system. :-)
I also have a couple. Quite useful too. (Score:4, Interesting)
One is a dedicated NTP (Network Time Protocol) server, with an attached GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver (Trimble Resolution T). The receiver puts a PPS (Pulse Per Second) on a GPIO (General Purpose In Out) pin. Using out-of-the-box NTP software, it is aligned to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) with an offset of less than 1 microsecond. I had the GPS receiver in a much busier computer, but there was too much fluctuation, so the accuracy wasn't as good. In particular, the other box did CPU stepping, which is bad for for this sort of thing.
The other Raspberry PI is also a single purpose appliance (for now). Using some of the features of pulseaudio, I stream music via multicast and RTP (Real Time Protocol). A Raspberry PI is hooked up to some active speakers (via a USB soundcard). The Raspberry sits around listening for the multicast, and plays what it gets. I did it this way, using pulseaudio multicast, so that all the music players in the house are in sync (as far as my hearing can tell).
From my point of view, what makes the Raspberry PI attractive is that it is reasonably inexpensive, reasonably power frugal, reasonably well documented, and has strong support. All this makes it pretty much ideal when turning a general purpose computer into an appliance, with the possibility of changing its use in the future, or adding uses.
Best wishes,
Bob