Raspberry Pi - Hardware Flaws and Fixups?

Now that people have actually started receiving the boards so the design in final, is the schematic close to being posted?  I looked around again in various likely places just now, but haven't spotted it yet.

actually, the design may not be quite final yet.  Liz said: "Happily, we’ve found it doesn’t need a shielded enclosure to reach Class B, although it will require a (very minimal) redesign." http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/978, page 3, April 10, 2012 at 7:04 pm.

It hasn't been announced when such a change might be implemented, but probably better sooner rather than later, given the large production runs planned, perhaps along with a change to fix the SD card voltage issue.

You shouldn't host a popular website and forum on a raspberry pi.

The forum on raspberrypi.org is moving to phpbb instead of the wordpress thingy. Why? PHPBB is written more efficiently so that it will be able to handle increasing traffic.

Writing reasonably efficient code will allow you to do things with your 'pi that it was made for. You'll have to buy a bigger machine to do bigger things.

The fact that chips are listed does not mean that they are available. They often make nice pages advertizing new products cleverly hiding the fact that they are not available until 3Q2012. They hope you'll design with their component and only then find out that you can't buy them in quantity. That said, no 8Gb, 168 ball, 1.8V DDR2 is listed in the page you mentioned. (I don't know how likely it is that they would be compatible if it were listed). On the other site, I could not find any specs to see if it might be compatible.

right, you shouldn't host a popular website on a RPi, but you might want

to host a less popular website, with 1GB+ of the most frequently accessed

pages cached in RAM.

It looks like the 8Gb, 168 ball, DDR2 part listed is 1.2V rather than 1.8V.

If you have that kind of high hitrate, you shouldn't use a Pi for it..

The RPi is perfectly suitable for a server, costs about 64 - 80 MB in memory, remaining is for applications, caching...  more than enough to do all kind of things

I usually use the filesystem for storing webdata, no database overhead and very fast access, most of the time everything is cached automaticly by the filesystem.

I hope that in feature version they will stick to the 256 MB.....

That will make/force people to make/find more efficient solutions/programs.

Hans

Hans,

  It may seem to you that the RPi was designed with a ridiculously small RAM

in order to "make/force people to make/find more efficient solutions/programs".

But that isn't the case. 

It was designed the way it is because it was repurposed from the Roku design

as an educational computer rather than a media center, with no easy way to

enlarge the PoP memory.  As opportunities for enlarging the memory become

readily available, I'm sure the RPi will take advantage of them, even beyond 4GB.

If the RPi designers actually subscribed to the "hair shirt theory of programming

excellence", they would have reduced the cost by using 128MB instead of 256MB,

or maybe even left off the PoP RAM completely and used the 128KB L2 cache for

program memory.  That would still have been much more memory than the BBC micro.

Hynix 4Gb (=512MB) PoP RAM is now in mass production.

http://www.hynix.com/products/mobile/mobile.jsp?info.ramCategory=&info.ramKind=28&info.eol=NOT&posMap=MobileDDR2

previously this page showed the status as "customer samples".

Did you end up trying your DS1338 RTC board with with Pi? 

It looks like it can operate at 3.3V so no level conversion is needed.  I've hooked up the DS1307 RTC with bootc.net's Linux 3.2 image and it worked well.  But I'm interested to switch to 3.3V part so avoid the wiring mess.

Drew, I didn't even realize that Element 14 had their own blog system until you posted this, and that people were replicating RPF's blog posts to it.

That could be very useful, since it allows commentary without their petty censorship, and it overcomes the Foundation's continued attachment to Wordpress which has always made navigating their blog a pain.

If you're willing and able to recompile the kernel, you can add some platform data and have the kernel read the rtc and set the date and time for you. This removes the need to use hwclock and binding the driver to the correct i2c address. It's possible to add platform data for all sorts of i2c devices so that they come up automatically on boot, regardless of userspace.

One of my projects is to add an RTC and a GPS with PPS output to my Pi and turn it into an NTP server.

Yikes, I've read about IP address bans and just realized that might mean a user wouldn't be able to even read the RaspberryPi.org blog, is that right?

In general, I'd love to see more members of this group post in the group's blog about any Pi projects/tinkering they might be doing.  I'm going to post about another I2C device shortly.

That sounds very exciting!  I'm going to have to try that.  The attraction of the Pi to me is being able to meld my electronics tinkering with the kernel I've been running for so many years - and learn more about how it works at a lower level in the process.

That sounds very exciting!  I'm going to have to try that.  The attraction of the Pi to me is being able to meld my electronics tinkering with the kernel I've been running for so many years - and learn more about how it works at a lower level in the process.