Raspberry Pi Catch-All

Where did you get it from and how much do they charge for shipping?

I got it from MCM since they have it in stock and they charged me $7.99 for shipping the Pi, the power adapter, and the case (I got the other stuff from Amazon).

Cool thanks. I already have an extra card & reader so will just need case, power supply, and board.

I ordered my Pi3 through MCM as well. Just the Pi. $35 plus shipping. I ordered it the same day they were announced, I believe. I just got my shipping notice today. It should be arriving on the 16th. I'm going to use it as an HTPC and emulator box. I'm debating if i should use seperate micro sd cards for each operation or just load it all on one.

First Pi for me, but I'm familiar with Kodi boxes.

Quick question. I just realized Microcenter carries these but they have different versions "Element 14 Raspberry Pi ", "Allied Electronics Raspberry Pi", ect. Are these just different manufacturers? If so is there any reason to get one over the other?

http://www.microcenter.com/search/se...

Edit: Screw it, ordered from MCM. $8 wasn't worth dealing with Cambridge traffic

They're all the same. I think those listings are for when their shipments arrive from each vendor. I don't think Microcenter actually has any at the moment. I could be wrong though.

So my SD card is due next Tuesday (Amazon), the Pi, case, and power supply is due Wednesday (MCM), and the SD USB memory card reader is due the 27th (Amazon)?!?!?!? I got the adapter from Amazon but I guess I didn't notice it was a third party seller and not fulfilled by Amazon Think I will see if my stepdad has one of the adapters I can borrow.

Are these just different manufacturers?

AFAIK, they're sometimes made in different factories. I'm not aware of any data suggesting that there are significant differences in reliability, and since they're otherwise identical, there's no performance difference.

Think I will see if my stepdad has one of the adapters I can borrow.

Just remember you want a USB charger that has at least 2A, and 2.5A is better if you're going to be driving anything more than like a keyboard with the Pi's USB ports.

Half the reason I am looking forward to buying a house is to fill it with a million RPi projects. There will be Pis tucked out of view in damn near every room.

If you're interested in running a Pi 2 (or 3) as a text-based server, I've found this image to be very, very useful:

http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02...

This is basically stock Debian with a custom kernel and firmware image. The original Pi has a really weird combination of ARMv7 (which is an old version of the instruction set) with hardware floating point instructions, and normal Debian either targets v7 without hard float, or v8 with. The Pi 1 and Zero don't fit either, so Raspbian is everything recompiled to suit.

But the RPi2 and 3 support v8 hard float, so stock Debian almost runs natively. That image basically gives you a custom kernel and firmware package to get normal Debian booted, and then you can mostly update it the regular way from there, directly from the Debian servers instead of from Raspbian. The binaries run faster than Raspbian's, and MUCH faster than the Ubuntu Pi 2 image, which is just freaking GLACIAL. God, that is just SO SLOW.

There's a problem with the almost-stock Debian image, though: the guy doesn't seem to be updating his kernel. The one he's shipping comes with several vulnerabilities, and he seems to be ignoring email. (I was willing to give him new binaries if he wanted them, but he never replied when I offered.) So, if you want to run that really nice image, compiling your own kernel becomes important.

There are instructions here:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/document...

Note, however, that these are for Raspbian, not the custom firmware this guy did. They work almost verbatim, but he puts his boot config files and kernel in /boot/firmware instead of just /boot, so you have to modify those instructions a little when you're creating the image. What I did was to change that last line in the RPi 2 instructions to look like this:

sudo scripts/mkknlimg arch/arm/boot/zImage /boot/firmware/kernel4.1.19.img

and then edited my /boot/firmware/config.txt to load kernel4.1.19.img instead of kernel7.img. (I imagine you'd probably want to adjust that number, it won't be 4.1.19 for very long.) And note that the compile will take a long time, even if you use -j4 to use all four CPUs. On the Pi2, I think it takes about three hours to build, possibly longer; I just start it running with screen and go do other things. (screen will keep the build process going if I accidentally disconnect.)

I also copied all the DeviceTree files to both /boot and /boot/firmware. I'm not sure when they get loaded or even if they get used on this Debian image, and they're small, so I stuck them both places, just in case.

I've been really happy with this setup. It's really zippy, and I just have to remember to manually update the kernel once in awhile.

Malor wrote:
Are these just different manufacturers?

AFAIK, they're sometimes made in different factories. I'm not aware of any data suggesting that there are significant differences in reliability, and since they're otherwise identical, there's no performance difference.

Think I will see if my stepdad has one of the adapters I can borrow.

Just remember you want a USB charger that has at least 2A, and 2.5A is better if you're going to be driving anything more than like a keyboard with the Pi's USB ports.

The adapter I am talking about is the Micro SD to USB adapter. Got it from a 3rd party seller by mistake (hate it when I do that) so it won't be here until after the Pi gets here I may be one of the few people I know who owns no SD card stuff. My camera uses Compact Flash (it is old) and that is the only thing I have needed memory cards for since the PlayStation2.

the Micro SD to USB adapter

Oh, I see, the tool to load your image on the SD card in the first place.

I bought a USB3 universal reader a couple years ago, haven't regretted it. My prior USB 2 reader went flaky on the SD port, so I had to replace it. I've got both CF and SD here, and being able to read both on one reader is nice.

On the whole, I really like SD cards. I'm pretty boggled by MicroSD, though... 128 gigs on a little sliver of nothing, not even as big as my thumbnail. They're so small they're annoying... way too easy to lose.

I remember being very impressed by a 256 megabyte SD card, thinking to myself, "Wow, that's about 200 floppy disks in a postage stamp." Now it's 500 times that much, in a thumbnail. (edit: something on the order of a hundred thousand floppies.)

Malor wrote:
the Micro SD to USB adapter

Oh, I see, the tool to load your image on the SD card in the first place.

I bought a USB3 universal reader a couple years ago, haven't regretted it. My prior USB 2 reader went flaky on the SD port, so I had to replace it. I've got both CF and SD here, and being able to read both on one reader is nice.

On the whole, I really like SD cards. I'm pretty boggled by MicroSD, though... 128 gigs on a little sliver of nothing, not even as big as my thumbnail. They're so small they're annoying... way too easy to lose.

I remember being very impressed by a 256 megabyte SD card, thinking to myself, "Wow, that's about 200 floppy disks in a postage stamp." Now it's 500 times that much, in a thumbnail. (edit: something on the order of a hundred thousand floppies.)

Yea the Compact Flash card for my DSLR is actually a tiny 4 gig hard drive (i.e. spinning platters). It was one of the biggest available at the time and can hold around 1000 RAW images and now I wouldn't considering buying a memory card under 32 gigs unless it was for a device that couldn't handle it.

Lets not forget about this being a thing that exists either.

Yep, it's pretty awesome. If only all phones would accept micro SD cards.

EvilDead wrote:

Yep, it's pretty awesome. If only all phones would except micro SD cards.

Yea that is one of my few complaints about the iPhone.

EvilDead wrote:

Yep, it's pretty awesome. If only all phones would exceptaccept micro SD cards.

FTFY, but it's a topic for...another thread. Maybe.

WD announces the PiDrive a 314 Gig drive for the Raspberry Pi. They run $31.42 US.

Kurrelgyre wrote:

FTFY

Whoops. Thanks!

Rykin wrote:

WD announces the PiDrive a 314 Gig drive for the Raspberry Pi. They run $31.42 US.

I think the internet might have broke that link.

I'll admit to just jumping into this thread blind, so point me to old discussion if it's repeat. I'm just wondering what everyone is using their pi for. I got a Pi B+ a year or two ago thinking I could have a low power video streaming box for my TV from my PC. Got it working okay, though pretty buggy and eventually gave up. Now with my Steam Link, I've got that covered. So I starting thinking about having a low power music streamer with my Pi, but B+ isn't powerful enough to run any Plex server that I could find-- Plex being my streamer preference until I can figure out something better for music from home to my phone on the go. I'm thinking about upgrading to a Pi 3 if it'll do what I want, but truth be told, I've not really started looking into it yet. I'd love to get that PiDrive for all my music on a low power Pi that I can leave on all the time and have my music on the go.

Aside from that, I have no idea what to use my Pi B+ for. I'd love some ideas from what you all have done/are doing.

My Pi2 replaced my original Pi; it's a backup DNS and DHCP server for my network, and also serves as my key generator, because it has that nice hardware random number generator. It doesn't actually do that much, most of the time, but since it only takes about two watts, it's not like it costs much to leave it running. I figure at 3 watts (allowing for some waste by the power adapter), at 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, the Pi 2 should have a run cost of about $4/year. This would be a little higher if you had a bunch of stuff hanging off it, though... a fully loaded 2A@5W adapter could cost $15/year or so.

The big problem with the Pi series is that all the I/O has to go through one USB 2 channel. So the total bandwidth to the outside world has a hard upper limit of about 12 megabytes/second, and that's only if you're pushing from RAM directly to network; if you're trying to copy to or from the drive, your max throughput is half that. (since that one link has to be split between the card and the network.)

The CPU on the Pi 1 (the model you have) is miserably slow. The 2 is much faster, and the 3 is faster still. But that I/O limit is a very serious problem for trying to use it as any kind of remote client. It's really best for locally self-contained applications. I'd think the 3 would be a reasonable little emulator box, for instance. Not great, mind, but reasonable.

edit: one caveat, though: I don't like that the Pi 3 has wireless without a hardware defeat switch. I try never to buy hardware that has that, and definitely don't put wireless signals on the main network. I want to physically be able to turn off all signaling coming from the machine, period, no matter what, so the Pi 3 isn't something I feel I can trust as much as the Pi 2.

Malor, that's been my experience as well. Writing directly to the SD Card, even on a class 10, tops out around 20 megabytes/second. Even basic HDDs are 4x+ faster. I hope they are able to upgrade beyond the USB 2 restriction for one of the next iterations, as that would be wonderful. As it stands, anything disk heavy is so very slow.

Writing directly to the SD Card, even on a class 10, tops out around 20 megabytes/second.

That's probably a burst measurement as the kernel buffers things to RAM; if you leave your application running for a minute or two, it should steadily drop until it's at somewhere around 12 megs a second. (or, possibly, even slower if you have an unusually slow SD card.)

Malor wrote:
Writing directly to the SD Card, even on a class 10, tops out around 20 megabytes/second.

That's probably a burst measurement as the kernel buffers things to RAM; if you leave your application running for a minute or two, it should steadily drop until it's at somewhere around 12 megs a second. (or, possibly, even slower if you have an unusually slow SD card.)

It was back when I was benchmarking a card upgrade, and stayed throttled for a little while.

Ah, yes: trueheart78 upgrades his RPi

trueheart78 wrote:

Upgraded the SD Card in my webserver Pi last night, and ran some benchmarks. Was previously using a Class 2 8GB MicroSD card in an adapter, now using a Transcend Class 10 16GB Ultra High-Speed SD Card.

My average write times went from 4.56 MB/s to 18.16 MB/s (397% faster)

My average read times went from 14.0 MB/s to 20.63 MB/s (147% faster)

Note: I tested using the methods in the RPi SD Cards wiki (Performance section)

I probably could have eeked out a bit more performance had I better investigated the results others had provided, but man, what jump anyways :)

USB2 has an upper bound of right around 12.5 megs a second. It can't go faster than that. (well, okay, maybe a little, but not much.) So if you believe you're exceeding those values, then the data is not actually being handled the way you think it is (eg, read- or write-caching), or you're not measuring what you believe you're measuring.

You can easily use a slower card than the USB limit, and would certainly see an upgrade if you replaced it (which appears to have happened in your case), but you can't go faster. Anything past 12.5 megs/second physically cannot be an accurate representation of the actual drive speed. To whatever degree you're exceeding that, you're measuring caching and memory speed, not the I/O subsystem.

Wow talk about bad shipping estimates. The Micro SD USB adapter arrived today. Delivery estimate started at 24th-27th and then changed to 17th-24th but it was in my mailbox today

Malor wrote:

USB2 has an upper bound of right around 12.5 megs a second. It can't go faster than that. (well, okay, maybe a little, but not much.) So if you believe you're exceeding those values, then the data is not actually being handled the way you think it is (eg, read- or write-caching), or you're not measuring what you believe you're measuring.

You can easily use a slower card than the USB limit, and would certainly see an upgrade if you replaced it (which appears to have happened in your case), but you can't go faster. Anything past 12.5 megs/second physically cannot be an accurate representation of the actual drive speed. To whatever degree you're exceeding that, you're measuring caching and memory speed, not the I/O subsystem.

That's the upper bound of USB 1.X you're talking about, right? USB 2.0 has a theoretical max of 60MB/s (480Mb/s), though the usual you'll see is around 30-35.

Well, you know, I'm not sure. I know there's a hard limit of about 12.5MB/sec, but in looking at Wikipedia, none of the numbers really match up right. For USB 1, they're saying 12 Mbit, instead of Mbyte, and USB 2 is 480Mbit.

I know that the real-life transfer on USB is much slower than the headline speed, because of poor protocol design, but I'm not able to easily reconcile either of those speeds against my own experience. Maybe they've gotten their bits and bytes confused??

Whatever the rev number or physical speed limit is, though, I'm very sure that the actual practical limit on one USB channel, the way the Pi does it, is about 12.5 megabytes/second, and that it has only one channel to serve all its external devices.

I just got my Raspberry Pi 3. Just waiting for the power supply to arrive today. I'll likely be installing RetroPie or OpenElec on it this evening. Yay!

astralplaydoh wrote:

I just got my Raspberry Pi 3. Just waiting for the power supply to arrive today. I'll likely be installing RetroPie or OpenElec on it this evening. Yay!

So I'm new to this but does Retropie include Kodi? If so, that is what I'm doing when I get mine.