RoadTest: Raspberry Pi 2: We're Giving Away 50 Units!!!
Author: johan825
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: Other parts which I used: 8GB uSD card, keyboard, mouse, TV, old 40-wire IDE cable, 20 wire ribbon cable, 2xnRF24L01+ chips, capacitor.
What were the biggest problems encountered?: My USB mouse only works on 1 of the 4 USB ports. Sometimes OpenELEC crashed when using CEC.
Detailed Review:
I tried to keep the blog posts which I made for the review, as objective as possible.
In this review I will also give my subjective opinion about the Raspberry Pi 2.
I started by unpacking the box which I received and took some pictures. Coming from a RPiB, I was pleased with the layout modifications (but these are already there from the introduction of the RPiB+).
I installed Raspbian and OpenELEC. At the time of the installation OpenELEC for Raspberry Pi 2 was not yet available for download from the official RPi homepage, but it was available on the OpenELEC homepage.
I measured the startup times of both RPi and RPi2. The details can be found in the blog post. Some overclock settings were used and also some benchmarks were done with sysbench.
Overall, the RPi2 (even when using 1 core) is an improvement compared to the previous models.
I read that webbrowsing should be comparable to a regular desktop, but I tend to disagree a bit on this statement. Browsing is much more pleasable than on the RPiB, but I would not trade in my regular pc for a RPi2.
With regards to HTPC usage (OpenELEC) I'm very pleased, the interface seems much snappier. (Sometimes I can still make OpenELEC crash with CEC usage, but this is the same on the RPiB).
In this blog post I comment on how I used the GPIO pins, the SPI bus in particular. 2 nRF24L01+ chips were used: 1 attached to an Arduino and 1 to the RPiB / RPi2B.
Compared to the RPiB, we have the same pins (and more), the usage is the same as on the RPiB. Althoug the examples are just to explain the usage, you can already imagine the possibilities for home automation.
For some reason my USB mouse only works on 1 of the 4 USB ports. (When I attach a non-powered USB hub first on 1 of the other ports and connect the mouse to the hub, then the mouse does work)
I'm also convinced that there would be a market for a Raspberry Pi model with the same specs but with an even faster CPU. But then again, wouldn't we have any other suggestions when such a board came out?
I'm very pleased with the board, it's much better for media player/desktop usage compared to the older RPi models. The faster CPU and increased memory are really useful.
