One of those two million is sat under my desk, collecting dust. I know a few others that are, and, I wonder what percentage of that 2 million are in the same situation?
Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be. Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.
I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure, everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to getting started.
It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially expected.
What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.
My RasPi is certainly collecting dust as well, but not for the lack of uses--It is connected to power, ethernet, and an external hard drive. I only ever access it over ssh and never need to touch it.
It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!
How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.
We have two computers. One works flawlessly, always. One used to be terrible, with backups corrupting every two or three weeks. Both was true for the Time Capsule we used at the time and the Raspberry Pi we replaced it with. I since reinstalled the second one and it works well now.
My conclusion is that Time Machine over Wifi is inherently flaky--regardless of whether the Time Machine is running on Apple hardware or not.
For those that don't know, duplicity handles incremental backups like TimeMachine, but will also encrypt your backups using GnuPG if you choose to do so. You can also configure it to store the backups to various different types of storage, e.g ssh or Amazon S3. I wrote up how I do it here: https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...
I had the same issue and then concluded that time machine is not stable over the network. The use of the sparsebundle is basically a way of pretending that the network drive is actually a local disk and it will corrupt itself on network faults. You can probably make it work semi-reliably over a wired network but forget wifi. This is a failure of Apple's design and there's not much that can be done until they implement a sane network aware solution.
Hmm, never encountered this issue before. I've been using the TM/netatalk mechanism for at least 3 years now, and I'm still using the same sparsebundle from 3 years ago. I'm not using a raspberry pi though.
> What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.
But it is. My Pi's are running headless and I access them over Ethernet. They suck less power than a VM running on a more powerful hardware and that's the point.
edit: I admit that it's easier for Web dev than for HW dev. I'd use Arduino for HW hobbies before a Pi if the project can be done with both.
its a good point about arduino being easier for hw dev than some of the other boards out there. Once you slap a full OS like linux on a device writing high level software is easier and very low level hacking becomes an exercise in operating systems and drivers etc etc and not a quick weekend long project controlling servos and whatnot.
I was particularly impressed with the approach of the Getting Started with Arduino book - for artists / non-electronics / non-programmers.
Thanks for that - a very tempting option, not in stock right now with RS Components in the UK, but seems the price of a months hire for a VPS, give or take, and roughly the same spec - therefore perfect for dev work where performance needs to be targeted.
> What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.
This is actually how the BeagleBone Black works. Install one driver, plus it in via USB, and it's powered and networked to your computer, and a JS IDE with GPIO control is automatically loaded.
I've suggested this several times, to several different people, and their response is always an outraged, ``But it's mine!'' followed by various reasons why they won't donate something they never use.
That's the case with most people. I don't know any body around me who has gone anything beyond blinking LED's.
The main reason is any thing you can likely do on your RasPi you can also do on your Laptop. The need for a small form factor devices in production use cases always exists. But any kind of mass production requires serious application of effort to bring the price, stability and quality to a optimum point. And its an effort that spans months if you work full time.
That's too much for the ordinary web developers level of patience who expects to launch a fully functioning product over a weekend.
I got two from the first batch - one from each supplier. One runs 24x7 at home as XBMC (which is little-used by the family), a VPN server, a small file server, and to record audio from a couple radio shows I like to timeshift. The other is in a box with a BrickPi board, camera board, and a LEGO NXT robot platform that I intend to turn into a running vision-based robot if I ever get time. I'm ready to pick up another Pi just for demos and maybe a 4th for PiMAME.
The first runs as domain controller using Samba4 for that. This was a major hazzle to setup since I needed to compile Samba4 to get it working (the one in the Debian distribution is somewhat shaky). For obvious reasons I never touch this one.
The second one runs a GIT repository and serves generally as tinkering box, such as setting up Apache for authenticating against the domain controller.
One of mine is operating as an HTPC. The other as an Internet streaming radio. I need to get a third so I can add network and OCR functionality to my printer/scanner. It might be a good idea to get a fourth to act as a backup domain controller. I could easily find useful jobs for more.
Yes. As you can see my first relay started out as an exit relay, but my fascist ISP (whom I can not choose or contact) kept on blocking my router's mac address, which made my relay unstable. Since I am not an exit anymore the relay has been running fine.
My tor nodes (bridge relay) on my Pi seems to go into "Relay unresponsive" and sometimes crash with what looks like circuit storms, experienced any of that on the Pi?
What happens sometimes is that there is insufficient memory. This happens if you do a lot of apt-get update and upgrade, or run other stuff. My relay just starts at boot and then does nothing else.
EDIT:
I chose 600 kb/s because this means that my cpu (almost) never hits 100%, but is still pretty active.
What's the plan for future devices? It would be great if some low cost device like this would have a 12-18 month upgrade cycle and create the sort of buzz as an Apple or Samsung device. Moore's law has benefits at $30 too. Maybe release a $99 version every year then make last year's model available at $35. Get Intel involved? They're really working hard to get into low-power devices.
Intel's chips are still more expensive than ARM's chips, at the same level. Intel isn't interested in making pennies in profit for each chip. For all we know the Atom division isn't even profitable these days, since the disappearance of netbooks and the very slow adoption in mobile, but being subsidized by the other chip divisions.
It would also be a very bad move for Raspberry to get involved with a company like Intel, and get themselves stuck with a historically abusive partner, that often tells you it's their way or the highway, like they did when they forced OEM's to buy their CPUs integrated with their GPUs, even if the OEMs already wanted to buy discrete GPUs. They're in a much better position picking a chip maker out of the dozen or so ARM chip makers.
I agree they should upgrade their chips, though, and maybe even have higher-end ones. Even now there are $200 ARM boards, which is what one that is 10-15x more powerful than Raspberry Pi would cost right now. However, I'd rather they don't split the architecture support by software vendors in 3: ARMv6(currently), ARMv7, and ARM8. I think they'd be better off just waiting it out until they are ready for ARMv8.
What about the CPU are you waiting for? Higher performance? 64 bit vs 32 bit? And what is the application that is made possible by that you can't do now?
More cores, mostly. I tried using the Raspberry Pi with server software such as Owncloud or calendarserver. It just barely works, but it is still very slow. Like, response times upwards of four seconds.
Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
There are quite a few quad-core, single-board, fanless ARM computers: utilite, wandboard, odroid, udoo, radxa.
I have two odroid U2 that I use for testing distributed and multithreaded code. One odroid core (exynos 4412 @1.7GHz ) is more than 8x as fast as the pi, for some numerical simulation code (ODEs). Storage is eMMC, so should be faster than the class 10 SD card in a Pi. It was very easy to get Linaro set up on them (for headless use, as compute servers). Recommend highly.
I use my two RPi for file serving, backups via rsync and btsync, limited web (one is at a remote location).
There's a utilite pro on order as well, but they are a bit backlogged, as I understand it. I'm looking forward to the 2x Gb eth (odroid is 100Mb) and faster bus and disk speeds.
Yeah, I could see why dropping that stuff on it would pretty much swamp it. Of course your running a giant PHP infrastructure [1] there which was built the way it was in part because memory and cpu cycles were "free."
What I'm saying is that you could implement the equivalent of OwnCloud and CalendarServer on the Pi knowing that it needed to be memory and CPU efficient, and no doubt get 300 - 500mS responses. But that would mean not using frameworks that start by assuming you have at least 1GB of memory free and can run an interpreter (PHP) on an interpreter (JS) on the actual code.
Looking at the code for these I think the biggest issue is memory for them. A 2G Pi would probably do what you needed, trying to swap on the Pi (especially if you do that to an SD card) makes it really really slow. Its better if you can swap to an NFS mounted file system, and even cooler if you can swap to a custom memory instance in another server :-)
Try convincing a physicist that ms means millisecs and mS means milliSeconds. Casually remind them about the difference between bits and bytes and lament the unfortunate fact that textbook writers still don't give enough respect to the "forgotten units". Let the doubt sink in just a little bit.
Well, for today's software, it kind of is slow. Its IPC performance is about 1 DMIPS/Mhz vs ~3.5 for the latest high-end ARM chips, which also have 3x the clock speed of RPi, and come in quad-core variety. Do the math. That's a 10x-40x delta. Of course such a board wouldn't cost $30 anymore, but they could still improve performance by at least 3x with another low-end, but more modern, CPU, even as single core, but even more as dual-core or quad-core. Even a single core Cortex A7 at 1.2 Ghz would be about 3x faster than Raspberry Pi (90 percent faster IPC * 70 percent faster clock speed).
Personally, I think they should wait until they can make a dual-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 with 1 GB of RAM for $25, which may be possible by 2015, and maybe a quad-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 one with 2 GB of RAM (and perhaps a few extra stuff), for under $50 (I would make it for $40-$45 so the total cost with shipping and whatnot still remains under $50 for most people, instead of going over that price point). A single core Cortex A53 at 1.5 Ghz (its stock clock speed) would be ~5x faster, and also 64-bit. By the way, Cortex A7 and Cortex A53 are both the true successors of the ARM11 CPU RPi is using, and they serve the same markets.
The $25-$50 market, is still probably their best market, since a lot more companies compete at the $100-$200 level.
Kind of slow, but the OP is talking about seconds in response time, something is going badly wrong. Software issues not CPU throughput. It doesn't help that IO is terrible, there is no point putting in a faster CPU without SATA and a bit more throughput overall.
They are in a great position for volume, so should be able to do better than the current choice that was suboptimal in so may ways. Not clear that the 64 bit stuff will be that cheap soon (plus porting code will take a while) but it depends when they are going to do something. Cheap is important.
i used to run Owncloud (php), which was ok for CalDAV and CardDAV, but the web interface was terribly slow. Now I run calendarserver for CalDAV/CardDAV (Python), which is fast for CardDAV (few data) and slow for CalDAV (a lot of data). I am also running Bittorrent Sync (binary blob, fast), and Time Machine backups (fast).
My conclusion: The Raspi is slow for serving with dynamic languages. Compiled stuff is fine.
Yes, I own a Beaglebone Black. But the operating system and the ecosystem surrounding it is oh so aweful compared to simply-Debian it-just-works Wheezy for the Raspberry Pi.
That probably doesn't matter too much if you are building some embedded thing, but I am mostly using my Pi as a web server, and I like that is so easy to set up and configure.
I own 1 rpi and 2 BBBs and all work just fine. I have the rpi 24/24h connected to a relay board and other things but tend to prefer the BBB due to the better CPU and easier to keep up to date with regular distros.
Relatively easy to get a server going on it, and lxde running as a GUI isn't too shabby (noticeably better than a GUI on the PI).
Only trouble with BBB is the lack of hardware accelerated graphics support (BBB has a graphics chip, but it's not working in any of the current kernels)
I have a Cubieboard, very happy with it. A new Cubieboard2 is on order. The 4 core A20 is pin for pin with the A10.
Not to be off topic, I have three Pi-B's doing local file storage, media center and on a robot platform. The ecosystem around the Pi is one of the best. A quick search will find someone doing something like your idea.
I am using two of those two million RPis with camera modules to record pollinators visiting flowers (backpackable; activated by motion; solar powered). I'm still ironing out some kinks with the software, but the quality of footage produce by the camera module, the low power requirements and the flexibility you get with the RPi are really pretty amazing considering the price.
Agreed about the camera module, with the important caveat that, like most of the rest of the Pi, the guts are proprietary Broadcom stuff. In particular, there are really basic camera settings (the light meter, white balance) that aren't accessible to the user.
Want to maintain a consistent white balance or exposure between shots? Sorry, no can do. And since it's a proprietary blob, it's not something you can fix.
I know many people have a problem with the binary blobs, but even with its limitations, the camera module is also at least $1000 cheaper than building a system using something like a PointGrey Flea 3 and better than any consumer grade USB webcam currently on the market. Power consumption is low enough that solar power is a realistic option while keeping the system portable. JamesH has also been very responsive with adding new features to raspicam/raspistill such as the very useful signal mode. It WOULD be nicer without the binary blobs.
Yeah, I agree that the camera module is really good for the price. It's just a bit frustrating not being able to fix things that I know that the hardware can do, because I don't have access to the source.
I have the raspi collecting images every 5 seconds, then shipping them off to a local box i'm dedicating to render the videos using ffmpeg (ffmpeg -r 30 -i "images_*.jpg" [+ x264 and crf at 23]). Then I ship them off to S3 for storage/serving.
The UI was custom built and is still very bare right now. Simply includes HTML5-video object with 2 video options (ogv and mp4).
The quality of the rendered video, as well as capture settings (controlling exposure instead of auto, etc.) still needs a lot of work, and this is an ongoing project for me.
I got a Pi and a case and connected it via a USB-to-MIDI cable to my electronic piano, and now I can play and record performances to midi files on the Pi. Really cool. It basically gave my piano a technology update so I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars for one of those newer keyboards with a USB port.
My next mini-project is to build a web app that can run these midi tools and list the performances in a nice UI, so that I can control the piano with a tablet or phone on the wifi network (using something other than an SSH terminal).
I am thinking of getting a couple of other Pi's for webcam use. I had one hooked up to a cam but it kept dying for some reason. Maybe because of the cheap wifi dongle.
It's an amazing little gadget and the sky's the limit on what you can do with it.
Well, it's a small and localized data point, but my kids (both in middle school) have had a blast with theirs. They've played around with a lot of things, including Scratch programming and a little bit of Python. We've gone back and forth between RPi and the desktop, since they can run pretty much the same software anywhere.
Something to consider is that the RPi wasn't launched into a vacuum like the earliest microcomputers were. So it won't have as profound of an impact.
At the lower grade levels, around 3rd through maybe 8th grade, Scratch seems to be a pretty big deal. Somehow, Scratch has been installed on every computer in our house, and a couple of Arduino boards arrived shortly after S4A was mentioned recently here on HN. I'd encourage Scratch in the schools before RPi.
The RPi has certainly been educational for me. I'm sure it wasn't the first, or the best, little Linux board. But in part due to hobbyist interest in it, there's a lot of good tutorial information out there, making it easy for someone like me (minimal formal training in programming and electronics) to create some pretty cool things.
My university sent out all the new computer science undergraduates a RPi each and held two challenges at the start of term, here's a video of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgjbiBG2sf8 .
My university gave us all one when we arrived. It's just been gaining dust as my laptop runs Linux and I just do all my programming on there. That and if I wanted to do a hobby project, I have coursework to do.
I absolutely love how ubiquitous these things have become. They're genuinely useful for a lot of different purposes but, to me personally, I like how eco they are. I realize this sounds a bit eco-hipster, but I really mean it: Whereas people used to have big media center machines under their TVs, you can just pop a Pi underneath your TV, install RaspBMC, and that's all you need. It takes 3-4w, nothing more. Lovely.
Having said that, a 60" TV and surround sound receiver will probably also take a least a few watts, if I had to guesstimate :)
Try element14. 1/2 the shipping time for $8, and you can order a tonne of other electronics stuff for the same shipping price too. Very good customer service if anything goes wrong too.
I have found mine very useful. It turned my old USB printer into a fancy-pants wifi printer. It has been running tiny-tiny rss since google reader shutdown. It runs an irc bouncer for me. It runs a dyndns updater for me much better than my buggy router.
It would also run an rss-full-article-fetcher process I wrote but it turns out to be impossible-mission to get ghc to compile or cross-compile anything for arm.
I've found it really useful for lots of low-power bandaid solutions to various problems I have had.
How reliable are they as always-on 'servers' wrt running off an sd card? Doesn't it wear out the card in a few months time if you consider all the writing to /var/log? Anyone had one running for close to the two year's it's been out now?
I think there is wear leveling that's pretty similar to SSDs. If you use a filesystem without journaling, it shouldn't be an issue. If the wear leveling is good enough, it could be that even with journaling, there's no problem. One could of course use jffs2 or another flash fs that has wear leveling in it if it proves to be a problem.
Too bad that miscellaneous issues prevent them from getting an Android port out -- regardless of RAM and CPU requirements, I've been trying to get a decent accelerated web view going on it since I first got one, and _nothing_ works well enough (Qt5 took forever to stabilise - and still isn't quite there yet, X11 still has no hardware acceleration, there are no browsers that take advantage of Wayland, Firefox OS is still not stable enough, and even the JavaFX preview ships without a web view).
But hey, they can play back video pretty OK, so I eventually settled on a mix of video and live streaming a desktop browser rendered on a normal PC:
Thing is, omxplayer crashes out of the blue for no apparent reason (either halts the player process or locks up the RPi _completely_, on any hardware rev) and have an alarming tendency to corrupt SD cards, so I'm moving to the Beaglebone Black ASAP.
They do make very nice low-power servers (I have one doing AirPrint via CUPS for iOS devices), though, and of course I try out a bunch of things on mine - if it runs quickly enough on a Pi, then it's blisteringly fast on a "normal" machine.
The BBB's main issue is the lack of support from TI for the graphics chip. Android is 'acceptable' on BBB, but the lack of hardware accel graphics puts a major damper on the fun (aka no youtube).
I've been following Pi folks since it came out and there are a range of people from those who pre-ordered to those who got one only as the result of a gift.
Pi's are good for teaching you things, so if you got one you would learn with it. A number of folks have started learning about Linux system administration with theirs after being somewhat 'light weight' in that department. Others are learning about new programming languages or environments, from node.js, to R, to Scratch, to python. Getting Docker on them has had people setting up server deploys. Running web servers have people creating small web sites with bootstrap and other technologies.
But if you really aren't interested in learning those sorts of things, well its not really very useful. Everything it does can be done 'better' in a production environment by a server, usually x86 based, designed to do what ever it is it is doing.
Bottom line is there are a lot of things an RPi can help you learn by giving you hands on experience. If you're not interested in learning those things, it probably isn't all that useful.
> A gateway into my network (almost all ports are open to the RPi including SSH). I can ssh in and then every device on my network is configured to accept connections from it. Hitting my devices directly (over v6, for instance) would be rejected by firewalls and such.
> Personal Cloud: I use BitTorrent sync to move files around my computers. Sometimes my desktop / laptop aren't on at the same time. I solved this problem by putting BTSync on my RPi. It's online 24/7 so my files are always accessible.
> MySQL server (for development).
Ideas I have floating around:
> Possibly hosting my email
> Internal services like Squid caching.
> Server-Side Development. It's a tight environment (ram is limited, cpu is fairly slow) so it forces you to build lightweight programs. If it can run well on a RPi, it's probably fine on a VPS.
> Monitoring/graphing uptime/latency -- My router doesn't do this for me.
> Scheduling backups (possibly via rsync?)
Your RPi is basically a home server. Use it to control devices in your house and do automation.
Aren't you putting the cart before the horse? The Pi is a great tool for solving problems; if you have something that needs automating or you need a small computer for, you can buy one and it's relatively easy to make it do what you want. But it's a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Get some GPIO breakout boards, and turn things on and off, read sensor values, and make an internet of things. Get some relays and learn how to turn off your TV/Sound System when it's not in use to save some power. Or control some christmas lights.
I also use one as a squeezebox client, with picoreplayer, and it works like a charm. Also tested it as a squeezebox server with squeezeplug and it worked great.
If you're a kinkster there was a "What do you do with your Pi" post on reddit a while ago, and some guy basically programmed it to fuck his wife - the joke of course being that a true hacker will attempt to automate everything, including romance.
The Pi already has a trailing-edge ARMv6 SoC for cost reasons. They'll probably be reluctant to move until the fab line used to make the current chip shuts down.
And Arduino is still very popular with a much simpler chip.
Actually not above 'hobbiest' usage. Its comparable to sales of other comparable things like Arduinos which have sold north of 2M units at this point if you count all the variations.
That said, like the Arduino, there are a small mix of custom-commercial uses in there, some educational where the units are purchased as part of a curriculum, and of course some 'novelty' purchases where people think "I should get one of these" and then never use it again.
So it has good penetration in the hobbiest market which, depending on who you believe is 3 to 5 million 'seats'.
Or a place to donate all of the ones that are collecting dust. Like other commenters have said, I'm sure computer departments at community colleges could use them.
Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be. Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.
I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure, everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to getting started.
It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially expected.
What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.