[HH] more Raspberry Pi reviews

[Tom Metro]

Adafruit Pi Box
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyHudYAOVRY&feature=player_detailpage

An enclosure for the Raspberry Pi. A clever design made from laser cut
polycarbonate that snaps together without fasteners.


Also from the Adafruit Twitter feed:

First Steps with the Raspberry Pi
http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20120603051148201/RaspberryPi-Introduction.html

  The first thing to surprise you about the Raspberry Pi is the size. It
  is slightly larger than a credit card, but with ports and sockets
  jutting out of each side. ... Without a case, users are exposed to the
  bare printed circuit board.
  [...]
  The Raspberry Pi's creators, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, want to
  spark children's interest in computer programming and encourage
  students to apply for computing degrees.
  [...]
  The Raspberry Pi has more in common with smartphones and set top boxes
  than it does with desktop machines. At the heart of the Pi is the
  BCM2835 System on a Chip which powers some smartphones and streaming
  players such as the Roku 2 HD player. With the large volume of chips
  in production costs can be kept to a minimum.
  [...]
  Obviously, the Raspberry Pi board, in itself, is not sufficient to get
  you up and running. It is, after all, just a bare board. ...we
  gathered up spare SD and SDHC cards, HDMI cable, ethernet cable, USB
  keyboard, USB mouse, 5V phone charger, and a monitor. After plugging
  in the leads and having loaded the Raspbian distribution to a 16GB
  SDHC card, we were set to rumble.
  [...]
  The SoC provides OpenGL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG and 1080p
  HD video. As you can see from the above specification, the Raspberry
  Pi does not have onboard wireless capabilities, but it is possible to
  use a USB-connected wifi dongle, although only some devices are
  supported. Neither does the Raspberry Pi have a real time clock.
  [...]
  It is easy to overclock both the CPU, RAM, and GPU of the Raspberry Pi
  by editing a single text file (/boot/config.txt), although this
  activity voids the warranty. Some users have reported speed increases
  of about 20%, without apparently affecting the stability of the
  machine.

The article goes on to cover Distributions, Benchmarks, Software, and
Things to Do with the Raspberry Pi.

I wasn't aware that this was the same SoC used in the Roku. Somewhere I
had gotten the impression that the Raspberry Pi was the first device to
use this Broadcom part.

(I've never gone searching for it, but I've never ran across mention of
people hacking Roku boxes. Don't they run Linux? Are they GPL compliant
(at least to the extent of releasing source and binaries so you can load
a modified firmware)?

Makes me wonder if the Raspberry Pi might spur development of Roku
compatible distributions such that there will be a selection of
semi-open firmware that can be loaded onto a Roku. The Roku is still
pretty cheap ($50 ~ $100), and likely a nicer package (enclosure,
remote) if you are looking for a set-top-box.)


Kurt Keville wrote:
> I have been reading on some of the DebDev boards that the Raspberry
> "might" be capable of supporting an armhf distro... that would
> austenibly fix a few performance issues.

This article covers testing with an armhf flavor of Debian:

  For the purpose of this review, we have tested the Raspberry Pi mainly
  using Raspbian, an unofficial port of Debian Wheezy armhf. Unlike
  Debian "squeeze", Raspbian is optimised for floating point operations,
  which helps to speed up some applications.
  [...]
  Raspbian does not come with a hardware-accelerated video player, so we
  have not tested the true capabilities of the GPU. Unsurprisingly,
  running MPlayer...on Raspbian did not generate good results with video
  lagging badly. If you want to use a hardware-accelerated video player,
  we would suggest you try out either OpenELEC or Raspbmc, both
  XBMC-centric operating systems, or omxplayer, a video player
  specifically made for the Raspberry Pi's GPU. Using XBMC opens up the
  ability to play videos including YouTube videos.

  All of the distributions are waiting for hardware accelerated drivers
  for X to be developed. The current X server used by the Pi does not
  allow EXA acceleration.


 -Tom