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  • Author Author: bluescreen
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About the Raspberry RoadTest units

Hi Everyone.

 

We've received some questions from our members about whether the 3 boards being given away in our new Raspberry RoadTest drawing are coming out of our initial delivery stock.

 

No way! The 3 RoadTest boards are the working Qual Prototypes that were used by the design team at Raspberry Pi to qualify the board design before it went to final production. As a result, these are not the standard units available for purchase. (For example some parts have been hand-soldered on these boards.) They are not for resale. For example we took one such unit to the Guardian newspaper last week for them to demonstrate it. The board worked well and enabled the Guardian to post a message on element14 from a web browser running directly on the Raspberry Pi.

 

Given the overwhelming interest in this product, we just wanted to explain that we are not authorised to sell these three units as they are non-standard and therefore not suitable for resale. Please be assured that we will be fulfilling customer orders on a first-come, first-served basis. I hope this helps clear everything up. If you have any questions, please post them below as replies and I will be happy to help you out! image

 

Thanks!


Sagar

  • in reply to Former Member

    "At some point you might consider manufacturing a version of the device tailored for embedded systems, without the GPU and without the HDMI and RCA interfaces.  You also might want to add more memory.  Doubling the memory would only add about $3 to the build cost, according to www.dramexchange.com (lpddr 4gb vs 2gb)."

     

    Ain't that supposed to be told to RPi themselves ?

  • in reply to bluescreen

    Hi Blue,

    Yes, Mike's demo is cool  It shows that the RPi is capable of doing embedded tasks, such as a web server, where the low power usage is nice because you probably want to leave it powered on 24/7.  This is something the Arduino can't do.

    Unfortunately, there's no SATA interface, no gigabit lan interface, and not much ram to use as a disk cache, so throughput won't be great, but plenty of small web sites don't need much throughput.

     

    The primary purpose of the device is for desktop use, because embedded usage wastes the GPU, which takes up most of the SoC.  The suitability for desktop use is much more in doubt, which is why some in-depth reviews would be very welcome.

     

    At some point you might consider manufacturing a version of the device tailored for embedded systems, without the GPU and without the HDMI and RCA interfaces.  You also might want to add more memory.  Doubling the memory would only add about $3 to the build cost, according to www.dramexchange.com (lpddr 4gb vs 2gb).

  • in reply to Former Member

    Hi Coder.

     

    I was kind of curious about that, myself. I'd expect sites that are heavy with rich media to take a while to load, but I wonder if this even applies to simple, text-based pages with a small assortment of images. I'm going to present this question to one of our in-house experts, Mike Powell, and see if he can show us this aspect of the Raspberry Pi experience in more detail.

     

    (Btw, if you haven't already seen Mike's intro video on the Raspberry Pi, it's pretty cool.)

     

    Thanks for the suggestion, and I'll update you as soon as I learn something on this.

     

    Sagar

  • Hey Blue,

    That's a really great idea to get the beta boards into the hands of some people that can use them and provide reviews.

     

    You might also consider trying to get a more in-depth review from Chris Cross at the Guardian if you have time

    before the road test.  In the review he did, he said web browsing was slow, but didn't actually show what

    web browsing was like.  Does it take a long time for each page to load?  Does the browser window scroll smoothly?  Is there enough memory to load large pages, or to do multi-tabbed browsing?  Can you run Python and have a web browser window open at the same time?  

     

    He said there were some problems and glitches, but didn't show what those were.

    He didn't show any youtube or other streaming video.  He didn't show what developing Python was like in

    a light-weight IDE like geany.  He didn't show how long it takes to boot, or to startup LXDE or Python the first time. 

    He didn't show what it is like to compile a medium sized C and/or C++ application.  He didn't show what it is like

    to do word processing, such as in LibreOffice.  He didn't show any audio.

     

    It would be really nice to have a review that shows typical desktop usage in a meaningful way, so we can see whether or not this machine is usable for desktop computing.