What's Your Pi Plan??

I have at least sort of two different plans with the Raspberry Pi

1- Use it for research on low cost embedded Linux application development as a remote or central controller for other systems, Internet of Things kind of stuff

    Some of the stuff I'm working on I started to post it here http://www.element14.com/community/thread/18981?tstart=0

2- I was planning to put together sort of a development lab, contributing my time and funding to have a bunch of R-pis on a local High School, but I'm having second thougths about it given that I'm loosing confidence in the Raspberry Pi Foundation to be able to deliver, and some attitudes that have been developing over there, on top of some of the techincal issues related to the board. I'll probably put the money on something more reliable and with more features, it will probably be more expensive but at least it won't blow up TVs or force me to try a collection of power supplies, SD cards, keyboards, etc, etc, to make sure they work

I was really excited about the R-pi, I've other ARM based development boards such as Beagleboard, Beaglebone, Pandaboard, etc., but my level of exciment with the Pi declined considerably, I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

-J

jamodio wrote:

 

I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

It's worth noting that the WonderMedia WM8750 SoC in the APC has on-chip Ethernet MAC, like the BeagleBone.  For a network appliance, that can be expected to provide substantially better performance than the off-chip Ethernet over USB as in the Pi and most other cheap Linux boards.

I'm looking forward to the APC.  It has the same lowly ARM1176 core as in the Pi rather than a Cortex-A8 like the BeagleBone, but it leads the way with 512MB RAM at an interesting price point.

Morgaine.

The APC has arrived ... so far so good. -> Android APC Board has arrived

-J

jamodio wrote:

 

The APC has arrived ... so far so good. -> Android APC Board has arrived

It'll be pretty funny if all of RasPi's competitor boards are a nice raspberry red while RasPi remains green with envy.

I just hope that RasPi's competitors do a better job of engineering.  I find Pi pretty depressing in that area, because it didn't have to be so.

So far the BeagleBone has impressed me most for its really high class design.  The fact that it costs more than the Pi isn't really relevant, because you can do good or bad engineering at all price levels.  Olimex produces many boards that are far cheaper than the Pi, and yet they include some really impressive engineering.

The APC looks very interesting.  Like on the BeagleBone, its SoC has Ethernet MAC on-chip instead of as an external USB device, so that's an immediate benefit for a network-connected device.  I look forward to checking it out once it becomes more easily available.

Morgaine.

Hmm, I'm not sure about putting the APC on the list of competing boards with the Rpi. While true that it may take some market share remember

that the requirements that drove the design of each board are quite different.

I didn't have much time yet to browse over their forum to see what some folks are working on, I believe some are already putting together

a eLinux distro for it. The board comes with Android 2.3 pre-installed, just a few apps and besides the UART there are no GPIOs.

But, there is a header that connects to the onboard SPI FLASH (MX25L4006E) that works as a BIOS, so you can have access to the

SPI interface, and there is another header for "Front Panel" stuff like a switch/LED, so with some hacking around one could probably

fit a GPIO extender via the SPI interface.

Also take in account that video resolution is lower than the Rpi, but RAM is 512MB instead of 256MB, it has VGA !! and 4 USB ports

The power supply section seems to be properly designed and a nice external 15W 9V power supply is included.

Right now shipping costs until they get distributors feels high, but for $49 is not a bad deal.

If you analyze the number of parts, size of the board, the number of connectors (that btw have a much better layout than the Rpi),

features, etc, and the external power supply included, the whole discussion about the cost of producing the Rpi ends being sort of BS.

Sure right now they are probably recovering part of the development costs with S&H but with better distribution and volume pricing

the $49 is quite credible and attractive.

-J

For those in the US & CA interested to thinker with the VIA Android APC Board, today becomes available from Newegg.com

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=13-181-041&utm_source=Notify&utm_campaign=e72c7f90b3-Newegg_Sales8_14_2012&utm_medium=email

No stock listed yet, but is only $5.99 shipping now.

I'm sure that other distributors will show up soon.

-J

Looking forward to it.  I bet it works with RF mice on USB hubs.

Hmmm, that's an interesting thing to try/test, I'll try to get one of those mini wireless keyboards with a touchpad, Adafruit has it listed (as compatible with the R-pi) but the price is a robbery, I've seen it much cheaper at Amazon.

Another thing that will look very cool is the enclosure they are planning to sell.

Quick preview:

I'm seriously thinking about ordering a second board as soon as the enclosure becomes available.

PS: I don't know if you noticed but this power DOES HAVE a power/shutdown button. On the stock pictures shown on the website the pcb does not have the pushbutton but on the board I received there is a power button and power led next to the J3 connector that works like a charm.

-J

Very cool!  And yes, it does look nice.

The lack of a power switch is actually a hidden cost on many of these boards, a cost either as a never-ending annoyance or else requiring actual expenditure to overcome.  For example, I use a 2-button remote RF mains control for turning my Pi and my BeagleBone on/off at their mains adapters independently, and that's not free.  The fact that APC has a power switch is strongly in its favor, and makes its "effective price" less.  What's more, it comes with a power supply, so its net cost is again less than the market price.

There's a similar issue when comparing Pi with BeagleBone:  the latter comes with a formatted micro-SD card, while the Pi comes with nothing.  This makes the Pi's $35 more an illusion and marketting deception than a reality, since it can't even be booted without an SD card, and the non-existent $25 Model A even more so.

Well you also need to factor in that it has 521MB RAM instead of 256MB and 2GB of on board NAND FLASH, yes video resolution is 720p, but audio is not just PWM port, and you have also a mic input. It has VGA that is better than S-Video, I've not tried it yet with HDMI.

So there are many things that make it more "cost attractive" than the R-pi, some folks were complaining about the shipping charges were to high for the frist batch of boards, but now they seem to be working hard to get distributors on board, so will see what happens.

Somebody on their forum was suggesting to get Raspbian ported to it ...

-J

Well you also need to factor in that it has 521MB RAM instead of 256MB and 2GB of on board NAND FLASH, yes video resolution is 720p, but audio is not just PWM port, and you have also a mic input. It has VGA that is better than S-Video, I've not tried it yet with HDMI.

So there are many things that make it more "cost attractive" than the R-pi, some folks were complaining about the shipping charges were to high for the frist batch of boards, but now they seem to be working hard to get distributors on board, so will see what happens.

Somebody on their forum was suggesting to get Raspbian ported to it ...

-J

Regarding the APC's 720p, I seem to recall that the SoC itself can handle 1080p, so maybe the 720 can be hacked upwards a notch by the community.

In the interest of fairness, APC has one very blatant downside:  Via does not seem interested in giving the APC owner full access to their own computer, treating it as a protected cellphone which has to be "jailbroken" first.  This is quite beyond the pale.  There's an important matter of principle at stake here, not to mention that it's also a matter of user pain to go through the jailbreaking, and it's also a matter of security to have to run a third-party binary in order to jailbreak.  It should not have to be necessary.

I guess this might change in the future, but to not look totally braindead, Via should really provide an Android app that pops up a window bearing a root login prompt.  Despite running Android, it's a computer, not a cellphone.

Morgaine.

OK, I ordered from Amazon a pair of wireless keyboards with touchpad to test with both the APC and the R-Pi.

Couldn't resist the temptation of a "bundle" offer with one of the keyboards and got also one of the MK802 thing.

I'll report what works where.

BTW, the APC folks are slowly opening the platform, not sure how deep it will go but they are in the process of releasing full sources of the kernel and drivers. I guess they need to clear out with some of they IP partners that some proprietary code or "previously stolen stuff :-)" gets leaked.

-J

I think I might play with my BeagleBone for a while, at least until someone finds a way to overcome the Pi's USB data loss for 1 keyboard and 1 mouse.  I just can't work with it like it is.  Even though it only requires an occasional additional mouse click and the keys only occasionally get stuck on, it's just too much, and drives me up the wall.

Morgaine,

  There are a couple things you might try with your RPi.

If moving your rootfs to a usb stick cures the keyboard

problems, then that would implicate the SD card driver.

If cold spray on the lan chip (suggested by mahjongg)

cures it, then that would implicate the 1.8v design error.

I found a couple of 2GB thumbs drives in the junkbox and they're recognized by the Pi kernel as sda, so I could try that.

I know what to do on the Unixy side, but not sure about the Pi boot side.  Setting root=/dev/sda1 in cmdline.txt on the SD card sounds like the way to go, but there are bound to be some gotchas with the Pi.  Are people on the forum engaged in this too?  (I couldn't find anything related on eLinux.org on first rummage.)

Just copy over all the files from the SD card to a partition on the USB stick.

I didn't want to push things, and just made an image of the SD card on the USB stick. So in my case it became sda2.

Anyway, yes, just changing cmdline.txt does the trick.