Raspberry Pi Catch-All

I just got mine yesterday, I'm pretty excited.
I hunted around and found in my apartment almost all the stuff I need.
I didn't even have to open a box to find an HDMI cable.
The power supply I ordered will thus be redundant, but that's alright (my Amazon Kindle charges the same way-through micro-usb port).
I just need a PS/2 -> USB adapter. I'm sure I have one or four of them lying around; I just don't know where they are!
What kind of store will have one?
Also a spare mouse. And I'll feel a bit better once the enclosure arrives.

If anybody wants to put FreeBSD on theirs (I plan on buying a second card for it at some point-first card gets Raspbian).

I wouldn't mind an enclosure but I just don't want to buy one right now - maybe down the road, when I want to take it places with me.

HDMI to a 1080p TV is quite hard for me to read, had to step mine down to 720p support - lower was... let's just go with bad.

Just print your own enclosure!

IMAGE(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a254/Liquidmantis/piCase.jpg)

Well, buying a $2K printer to print a $20 case is maybe a little cost-ineffective.

3D printers are getting cheaper... you can get okay ones for like $800, but they still cost a hell of a lot of money.

I can't believe HP isn't dominating this space; they are really, really run by chuckleheads these days. This would be the absolute ideal new market for them, but their leadership is so terrible that they don't even realize it.

The Motorola power supply turned out not to be good enough, but the charger for my Amazon Kindle works great! (and both say they put out 850 mA; the mouse I paired with it draws 100 mA, so beware of things like that).

Phones do it, so why not me, posted from my Raspberry Pi.

(using Chromium; and this is still a far better browser than the PS3, 3DS, or Vita browsers)

I tried using it as a desktop for a while. Figured maybe I could code on it or something. Anyways... I knew it would be slow, but I found that using it is painfully slow. More than one internet tab would cause it choke for seconds at a time. I guess my work laptop with 8gb RAM and SSD have sort of spoiled me.

Anyways, I got mine with a nice case like shown above, but in black. Right now it's shoved next to the router in a drawer and I'm using it as a headless personal web server. It handles that job real well.

Might do something cool with it in the future, but for now... it was a cool toy to play around with. I might do more with it in the future. I can SSH and remote desktop into it, so maybe I can figure out something cool to do with it.

Yeah, you'd probably want to go a little more upscale -- there are boards at about $90 that will be like five times faster, and with a great deal more RAM. The Pi is basically designed as the cheapest possible complete computer, and while it's amazing in achieving that design goal, it's also like using a computer from maybe 1997, something like a P2-300 or so, just with a huge amount of RAM, and hellaciously powerful video acceleration.

I suspect the RAM is what's really killing you, though. It's big by 1997 standards, not so much anymore. My Firefox has a couple of windows open with one tab each (this screen and Wikipedia, to make sure on the date and speed for the P2), and it's using 237 megs of RAM. Your Pi will have either 256 or 512 megs of RAM, so my present usage of Firefox would bring a 256-meg machine to its knees, and would be pretty uncomfortable on 512M.

It's really best for a headless type environment, or one where you're doing the minimum possible to get a video signal to the screen for HTPC duty. With those GPIO pins, it would also be fabulous at simple automation scenarios.

Watching the system monitor, the CPU maxes out quickly. RAM goes north on web browsing, sure, but for me, the CPU is the hindrance.

Still love it though -

Yeah, 256mb version. I was thinking of using it as an HTPC as well, since it has the ability to HW decode 1080p video. It might be able to handle it in the future, but when I was trying it, the options were pretty thin. RaspXMC or whichever it was worked somewhat, but wasn't a great option. It also basically kills any other options for it, no web server

For a tiny board though, I'm still impressed by what it can do. Being able to run Linux on a credit card sized board is simply astounding to me, especially at the under $50 price point.

Being shoved into a drawer makes me forget about it as well. Just SSH'd in, apt-get upgrade, 106 packages to update....

My sister apparently got me one of these for Christmas. It hasn't arrived yet, but it has apparently shipped. So I'll hopefully get it soon. I'll probably put xbmc on it or something. It would be nice to have a portable media player.

My outsourcing company hooked us up with Pi's as a Christmas present. How cool is that!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/OmToil.jpg?1)

FLTR clockwise from top:

  • Raspberry PI 2.0 model B 512MB
  • 4GB SD card preinstalled with Raspian
  • USB A to microUSB cable
  • 5V 0.7A power adapter
  • HDMI cable
  • Wireless adapter

They bought HUNDREDS of these complete packages, which by itself is impressive.

Wow, they really did right by you there, seswa. That is a very thoroughly considered and thoughtful gift.

seswa wrote:

My outsourcing company hooked us up with Pi's as a Christmas present. How cool is that!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/OmToil.jpg?1)

FLTR clockwise from top:

  • Raspberry PI 2.0 model B 512MB
  • 4GB SD card preinstalled with Raspian
  • USB A to microUSB cable
  • 5V 0.7A power adapter
  • HDMI cable
  • Wireless adapter

They bought HUNDREDS of these complete packages, which by itself is impressive.

So they're the reason it's always out of stock!

Malor wrote:

Wow, they really did right by you there, seswa. That is a very thoroughly considered and thoughtful gift.

I totally agree, but there are some ingrates that put it up on the local "ebay".

Going to start mine with RaspBMC, then try out OpenELEC.

I ordered one the other day, not sure what the delays are now.

I'm hoping to use it as a local web server for a museum installation, visitors to the exhibit can find its SSID and it will serve a web app, but not connect to the Internet.

(Plan b is to see if I can do the same thing w/ a router running open-wrt. I'm not sure the router will have enough oomph to serve the web app smoothly enough.)

I'm looking forward to testing both version of the project.

I'm surprised the package came with a .7amp power supply. Everything I have read states you are better off with something more like 1amp or higher to make sure you can provide power to all the components you might want to plug in. Lots of people had issues power supplies at .7amps as they rarely ever manage to keep within the voltage range you need at full draw.

Gaald wrote:

I'm surprised the package came with a .7amp power supply. Everything I have read states you are better off with something more like 1amp or higher to make sure you can provide power to all the components you might want to plug in. Lots of people had issues power supplies at .7amps as they rarely ever manage to keep within the voltage range you need at full draw.

It was likely a cost-cutting measure. 0.7A is minimum recommended, geeks will probably upgrade to a beefier adapter.
It could also have been a stock issue? Maybe no one had a few hundred 1+A adapters laying around for a reasonable price.

I have put Raspbmc on it, quite impressive.
I must get a 2nd one now

The person who specced out the gift kits probably didn't know -- he or she probably just got what the Pi people said was necessary, rather than what geeks believe is the right thing to do. I doubt very much the cost would have been an issue, it's probably just lack of actual expertise with the hardware.

That's still an awesome gift from a tech employer. An outfit that gives gifts with that much competence is probably a very good place indeed to work for.

Looks like a fantastic kit - many places sell those as bundles, I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of them.

Still crafting plans for how I will be using mine, longterm, that is.

So for the short term I have the Pi set up with Raspbmc, and it rocks! Not only does it seem to play video well, I got a 16gig SD for like 10 bucks (class 10 Sandisk), but you can also find it on the network so it I can upload files onto it and play those files on other PC's in the house. You don't even need to have the video, keyboard or mouse plugged in for that. I can ssh into it from another computer on the network as well. I haven't plugged in any USB storage yet, but I doubt that will be an issue.

As if I couldn't love this device any more! I just found out you can control the damn thing with an Iphone or and Android using the XBMC app!

I keep thinking about getting one of these to play with and maybe see if I can learn enough to put together an aquarium controller.

Where in the US is the best place to buy? I was looking at Element 14 (Newark), but can't see how much shipping would be without giving them all my info. A pet peeve of mine is when stores make the shipping undiscoverable until you give them all your personal info. Amazon has some through I assume a partner, but they're marked up to $60.

I might buy an enclosure as well.

Mannish, you can check EBay as well. I picked up mine with a nice enclosure for around $60. No bid, a buy me now, I think an offer as well

MannishBoy wrote:

I keep thinking about getting one of these to play with and maybe see if I can learn enough to put together an aquarium controller.

Where in the US is the best place to buy? I was looking at Element 14 (Newark), but can't see how much shipping would be without giving them all my info. A pet peeve of mine is when stores make the shipping undiscoverable until you give them all your personal info. Amazon has some through I assume a partner, but they're marked up to $60.

I might buy an enclosure as well.

I recently bought one through Element 14 for my Secret Stanta. I think it came to about $44 including shipping.

This is not advertising, but I ordered mine through some company called Newark and it's arriving Monday, only a week or so after I ordered it. Very smooth transaction.

Second post, better than the first!

Seth wrote:

This is not advertising, but I ordered mine through some company called Newark and it's arriving Monday, only a week or so after I ordered it. Very smooth transaction.

That's where I was looking, but they don't tell you what shipping will be until you give them all your personal info.

All I ask is a little shipping calculator before I commit to give you my email address that you'll probably use to spam me forever with.

Newark is one of the largest electronics suppliers, probably just second to Digikey. I believe the only thing they have ever emailed me is order confirmations and shipping notices.

LiquidMantis wrote:

Newark is one of the largest electronics suppliers, probably just second to Digikey. I believe the only thing they have ever emailed me is order confirmations and shipping notices.

Understood. It's just a personal pet peeve of mine. Normally causes me to close the site and search elsewhere.

RolandofGilead wrote:

I just got mine yesterday, I'm pretty excited.

Who'd you order from and how was the experience? I'd like to order one but I expect it will take six months or so.

For those that are worried, I ordered two from Newark/Element14 and the shipping was $5.45.