Getting ready for some embedded prototyping with the Raspberry Pi

Nice little board allí, jamodio.

There's no sign of interest in redesign at RPF, so I expect that there will be a lot of mods appearing to give Pi more sensible power management.  That FTDI module we were talking about the other day is still on my mind ...

Morgaine.

Here is the whole Raspberry Pi prototyping gig ... Everything is mounted on the solderless prototyping board, power supply is on and feeding the 5V directly to the expansion header of the Raspberry Pi board. Right now the bench power supply is set on ~7.2VDC, about ~300mA. The test leads are currently connected to a Fluke ScopeMeter running a trend plot (lower right corner picture) monitoring the 5V supply and the R-Pin internal 3.3V LDO Voltage Regulator.

Raspberry Pi is on and running the Debian Wheezy beta image. Ready for some prototyping wiring and coding of a couple of projects.

P.S. I don't know if you noticed on the picture, but the LAN9512 has now a tiny black heatsink I got from SparkFun, I waiting for some bigger ones I ordered from China for the SoC.

-J

To be frank I don't know what are RPF's interests anymore, as I said before, at least for me they lost a ton of credibility, and being a "charity" or whatever is just a lame excuse, as they are structured and staffed today they have no chance to deliver on their promise or fulfil their goals, much less when there is an entire community willing to help but being ignored or just turned away.

There are very good power management IC's that can do a better and more efficient job than the cascade of LDOs, also HDMI I2C isolation, and replacing the polyfuses by USB load switches are a must.

Firs thing that will go on the protoboard is one of the FTDI232 breakout boards from SparkFun to grab the serial console out of P1 and have it on a virtual serial port via USB on the PC.

While I've a monitor hooked up on the HDMI port I'm working most of the time via ssh, didn't test vnc yet, and the serial console will be great to have out of band access (not via ethernet).

It is really a shame the RPF is behaving this way, I always loved the idea and I still believe it has a lot of potential but on the current hands I thing it will get nowhere.

-J

I think the answer is simply to interface with engineers and ignore the 2 or 3 RPF people for whom PR is paramount.  The actual work isn't being done by them anyway, their "contribution" is only to destroy credibility in the project.  (Which is odd, because I bet that they think they're helping the Foundation by brushing problems under the carpet, when nothing could be further from the truth.)

FTDI232L breakout board (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/718) is in, right now I've the R-pi totally "headless", no keyboard, no monitor, just serial console via the FTDI chip to USB and virtual serial port on the PC running TeraTerm, works like a charm.

I'll measure it better later but there is obvisouly a noticeable reduction in current draw without the keyboard and HDMI.

-J

I'll measure it better later but there is obvisouly a noticeable reduction in current draw without the keyboard and HDMI.

I'd be interested in your findings.  With a ps/2 keyboard and mouse through a ps/2->usb adapter I saw maybe 10mA difference removing it. Removing HDMI didn't get any measurable difference.

selsinork wrote:

 

Removing HDMI didn't get any measurable difference.

Exactly the same here.  I'm using the HDMI input on a Dell 2408 24" 1920x1200 monitor, seems to add no current load to the Pi.