6 ms·

Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

37 points by tanglesome 13y ago

bananas 13y ago
Excellent. The more competitors to the Pi the better. I've been nothing but disappointed by mine - it's slow, convoluted and totally unreliable. I do expect the opposite for the money when you can get a generic android tablet for not much more.
- eephd 13y ago
  Care to elaborate what kind of applications you are using your Pi for? Also which generic Android tablet can you buy for not much more than $25?
- throwawayaway 13y ago
  there's many ways of measuring speed, but for a two watt computer i find the speed more than adequate. in addition if you wish to use it as a desktop the long awaited wayland port should mitigate gui performance issues. i can't see the competitors being less convoluted than a debian install. if your hardware is unreliable you should make a repro to make it fail(i ran a performance benchmark in a loop on one i had trouble with til it crashed) and send it back to the manufacturer. the rpi's popularity, and low power consumption are it's selling points. i wonder what utility an android tablet provides than an rpi could be expected to.
  - bananas 13y ago
    The thing is slow because the ARM core is tagged onto the side of the GPU. The chipset is designed for throwaway STB uses. The ARM core isny much faster than a 100MHz SPARC 20 I have. About 15% faster. The IO also sucks. For a general purpose computer it's painful. I posted instructions on how to make it fail on the RPi forum. My thread was deleted. The boot and video detection process is a total mess as well. Daring to suggest that is the case is frowned upon apparently as well as I was basically flamed for wanting to use composite video over HDMI. Bear in mind I didn't have an HDMI capable unit around and the thing is marketed as composite capable. Also I was getting USB brownouts with a powered hub connected. My thread was deleted. I've worked with embedded systems for a number of years and the RPi was a really low point in head bashing on wall. It's an awful platform. Its in the bin where it belongs.
    - throwawayaway 13y ago
      I am not sure what 'throwaway STB' means - something to do with phones? How many watts does your SPARC consume? I think the rpi makes a better stab at being a general purpose computer than an android tablet, and I think that the wayland port should improve it further. However I agree it's no replacement for a power hungry intel box. Post the instructions here, I will test on mine to see whether it's a general problem or just your box - there have been faulty ones shipped, but it's a tiny percentage of the total. Having threads deleted seems to be a common theme on popular forums, it doesn't usually signal a cover up - the moderators can take exception to your tone and then you have no recourse. When my rpi posts it seems to look for a hdmi cable, if none is present it outputs to the yellow composite - how does yours differ? I can't understand if you mean brownouts in terms of power or in terms of connectivity - what was dropping out? I can't say I have any experience with embedded systems but typically when people say that they aren't referring to computers that the rpi is comparable to - e.g. hdmi out, usb, ethernet. What were you doing with the embedded systems that you couldn't do with a pi?
chm 13y ago
I'm quite surprised the RPi team hasn't created a new model in two years. Sure they just released a new "compute module", but that's not destined to the same crowd. I'd like to see an RPi revision C. Other than that, do any of you know of a chip I could buy to program from scratch? I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor but I have no idea where to start. I heard M68Ks are nice.
- jck 13y ago
  What about one of the MSP430s?
- tdicola 13y ago
  You can't go wrong with an Arduino. You can use the Arduino IDE to get up to speed very quickly, and then later program it with avr-gcc and get rid of the Arduino bootloader/libraries if you desire. The next logical progression IMHO after Arduino/AVR chips is bare metal ARM development. Check out chips like the NXP LPC series which can be programmed with a free GCC toolchain, and more importably support on chip debugging with OpenOCD. Good getting started guide here: https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/introduction https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/i...
- duskwuff 13y ago
  M68K is dated. It's still used in some applications, but it's basically a dead end. ARM is where it's at these days. There's tons of ARM development hardware out there, but two cheap, awesome development boards I'd recommend might include: * The TI Tiva LaunchPad - http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c123gxl http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c123gxl * The STM32F4 Discovery - http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252419 http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252... Or, if you want to get adventurous, there's tons of ultra-cheap ARM development boards on eBay. You'll usually need to get your own JTAG adapter to work with them, and figuring out how to drive some of the peripherals may be a bit of an adventure, but the prices are unbeatable. (I paid about $40 for a "HY-STM32" board with a 3.2" touchscreen, for instance.)
- Narishma 13y ago
  They intentionally haven't released a new model, and don't plan to do so any time soon. They want to have a stable hardware platform, and spend time optimizing the software so it can benefit all the RPi owners, instead of continuously releasing new models and fragmenting the community.
tdicola 13y ago
Neat board, but I think it's going to be more useful for the media center/home server crowd than makers/hardware crowd. Some of the gripes I have: - Male header pins are kind of a pain to connect to a breadboard, at least compared to female pins on a Beaglebone Black or Arduino. - I'm assuming there's no analog to digital converter, like the Raspberry Pi, so that's annoying if you're reading analog sensors or other things. - Realtime support. Does the Allwinner A20 have any kind of realtime support microncontroller, kind of like PRU's on the Beaglebone Black? If not that's a bummer since interfacing with anything that has tight timing control (like lighting WS2811 LEDs) will be impossible or require more supporting circuitry. Don't get me wrong though, an open/hackable stick computer that's not expensive is still very interesting and useful to some folks.
- pekk 13y ago
  If the new part would be clearly useful for home servers, I would find that refreshing. "Makers" is not an actual use case. I always struggled to see exactly what Raspberry Pi was good for, that something else isn't better for.
  - tdicola 13y ago
    "Makers" is not an actual use case. I don't agree with that--it might not be a use case to you, but is certainly a valid use case for these small development boards. Look at the success of Arduino, Maker Faire, 3D printing, DIY drones, etc. to see evidence of a large and vibrant DIY and maker community.
    - quanticle 13y ago
      I think a distinction can be drawn between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. I can see a use case for a (relatively) cheap, easy to program microcontroller with a board layout that makes it dead simple to integrate with sensors, motors, actuators, switches, etc. But that's an Arduino, not a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small ARM SoC that tries to be both a microcontroller and a general purpose computer and doesn't do either particularly well.
maratc 13y ago
$74 after shipping? Newegg will sell you a motherboard with a dual-core x86 CPU for $50 ($32 after rebate). With a new AMD AM1 platform, you can get a four-core x86 and a motherboard for $69. Raspberry Pi is a nice thing for $35. For $75, much nicer alternatives exist.
- mongrelion 13y ago
  Actually, I hadn't thought about this. My uncle's in need for a media center (he's already got the home theatre and the forty-something-inches LED T.V. and I was thinking of gettin'im a RPi with the rest of the fancy stuff but you totally would get waaaay better performance with a little bit more "expensive" board. The last time that I checked for this kind of solutions I was fancying some Zotac box but that one was ~US$350. Which $75, much nicer alternatives are you talking about here? :)
  - pmjordan 13y ago
    The Intel NUCs are in a similar price range, especially once you take case, PSU, etc. into consideration. You can get them motherboard-only, but in the pre-built ones you just add RAM and Flash/HDD and you're done. The NUCs probably also win on overall power consumption, just check that you can use accelerated HD video decoding in the model you choose with the software you want to use.
    - dwild 13y ago
      There's Intel NUC cheap than 350$? Also case and PSU aren't a problem, either you get a Pico PSU for 50$ with a cheap case, or you take a case that include a PSU. They are cheap and the fan are noisy but for under $60... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154062 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154...
      - pmjordan 12y ago
        The RRP of the Intel NUC Kit DN2820FYKH is $128: http://ark.intel.com/products/78953/Intel-NUC-Kit-DN2820FYK?ui=BIG http://ark.intel.com/products/78953/Intel-NUC-Kit-DN2820FYK?... I believe that includes the Wifi/Bluetooth module already, but not the DDR3L RAM module or an SSD/HDD. If that model is missing something you need you can of course opt for one of the more expensive ones - there is a reasonable range. I'm considering getting one to act as a router, DD-WRT/OpenWRT on consumer/SOHO router hardware is incredibly fiddly. The power consumption of some of these devices is comparable.
Jack5500 13y ago
The English on the official BananaPi website troubles me...
sparkie 13y ago
Olimex already have a board based on this same SoC (and others from the same family of AllWinner SoCs), but unlike the Raspberry Pi, are completely open source hardware. (Banana Pi doesn't seem to be open, given the limited information too). The price is the same, and I'd much rather support open source hardware efforts. The schematics and Eagle files are on their github page. More info here: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO They're already working on a board for the next generation A31 SoC too.
frik 13y ago
I want a dual-core 1.4+ GHz ARM board with 2GB RAM (comparable to last years smartphones). Why is there no Raspberry Pi C announcement already? The type B is already a bit dated and who needs the "compute module"?
- Narishma 13y ago
  See my reply above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657271
  - frik 13y ago
    They have already fragmented the type B model with releasing 256MB and later 512MB versions. They should just release an type C model with faster CPU and GPU. The type B model is too slow for some "Full HD" resolution computation of the official Rpi-Cam as well it is too slow for most Linux distributions (even basic web browsing). A ARM board version similar to Intel's first generation ATOM 320 (1.6 GHz dual core with HT) would be fine for "type C".
J_Darnley 13y ago
Who benefits from it though? When you buy a Raspberry Pi some of the money goes to the Foundation who then use it to promote programming in schools.
outside1234 13y ago
I actually don't want a faster version. What I want is a more energy efficient version (still ARM) with roughly the same performance that makes it feasible to run on batteries or solar. Does that exist?
- lhl 13y ago
  The current RPi A is about 2.5W, so already pretty cheap to solar power w a battery/small panel. Search for "solar rpi" etc to find lots of examples. Depending on your use case, the Beaglebone Black is a good alternative and idles at about 1W.
- tdicola 13y ago
  Go bare metal and make constant use of sleep modes. The less time your system is awake and running at full speed the better. There are some cool low power chips like the Tiny Gecko: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/lowpower/pages/efm32tg-tiny-gecko.aspx http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/lowpower/pages/efm32tg-ti... However you can probably get most chips down into the sub-milliamp range while asleep and run for months or more off a few batteries.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  Why does it seem to be so difficult to run a Pi off of batteries? It draws less power than many phones. I was boggled that the Raspberry Pi AdaFruit store, which has dozens of different Pi-compatible displays, keyboards, cases, and exotic sensors and output devices, doesn't have a single external battery pack.
  - throwawayaway 13y ago
    it doesn't seem to be difficult: check out this thread or google for hamish cunningham. http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=25674 http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=25674
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  I imagine a 800-1,000 Mhz Cortex A53 version would be 0.5-1W, if they decided to make one for next year. But not sure if that's their target market. They will probably keep power consumption about the same, and launch one at a higher clock speed, perhaps even as dual-core, to better run other distros on it (such as Ubuntu).
amit_m 13y ago
I was hoping for a cheaper board. Even if the Raspberry Pi foundation were to just take the old model A and drop the analog I/O ports and LED lights - with their economies of scale and the natural decrease in chip prices, I'm guessing they could ship a ~20$ board.
- tdicola 13y ago
  There is no analog I/O on the Raspberry Pi. You can do PWM output on a pin, but otherwise no analog input or output. There really isn't much to drop from the model A--it's just the processor and supporting passive components with some headers, connectors, etc. edit: I guess you could drop the analog video and sound output, but that would probably just save a few cents for the connectors.
apapli 13y ago
For those more technical than I, is there actually any benefit in having the 1000Mbps NIC on a board with still a relatively slow processor? I fear the processor can't handle anywhere near that amount of throughout that NIC could support, so to me it looks like a feature for the sake of being different to the Pi.
- dfox 13y ago
  At the minimum it is useful because it is connected to CPU/memory by something more meaningful than USB as is the case with Raspberry Pi. Also for many interesting workloads (essentially anything that involves scatter-gather DMA from some other peripheral, eg. routing, file/storage server) you don't need that much powerful CPU to saturate gigabit ethernet.
  - apapli 13y ago
    Thanks!
dfc 13y ago
Where are all the perfunctory Betteridge's law comments?
InclinedPlane 13y ago
One of the cool things about arduino lately is that they're getting cheap enough and small enough to just use as part of finished projects, instead of just as learning tools or prototypes. The neat thing about raspberry pi was that it offered a similar proposition, except instead of a microcontroller you could bring to bear the full power of a computer running linux. I'm more excited to see smaller, lower power, and cheaper versions of the pi than more powerful and more expensive versions. Because that's what will result in them being used in projects more.
Codhisattva 13y ago
"Faster" versus "Fast Enough"
explorigin 13y ago
Be careful with the Allwinner processors. The Cubieboard has some serious network speed issues. Do some homework before you expect to make a router or high-bandwidth server.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
> the $35 Raspberry Pi, which was introduced in 2012, with its 700MHz ARM11 processor and 512MBs of RAM, is looking a little dowdy these days. Someone has fundamentally understood the reason that the Pi exists. Also, these guys have immediately blown their trustworthiness by deliberately creating confusion between their brand and an established one ("[fruit] Pi").
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  Ugh. That should say "misunderstood," of course.
kkh 13y ago
This is probably as good a thread as any to ask which single-board ARM computer has the best performance/price ratio, preferably one that's more powerful than the Raspberry Pi and can do duty as an everyday system.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Interesting set of comments. Clearly the RasPi does what it does, for those who want that, really well. As embedded/single board computers go, it has been very successful. The flavor of comments about the Banana[sic] Pi are very similar to those made about PCs, especially in the earlier days, of the form "I want it to be more like <computer I'm used to>." I have come to believe that this is really a form of saying "I want the computer I have at the price of this computer which can't do what I can do on the one I'm using." Sort of a having cake and eating it too sort of comment. Looking at the various entrants in this space, the Pi, the Beaglebone Black, the Galileo, Etc it is clear to me that manufacturers are exploring this space. Its unfortunate that there isn't a lot of coherent feedback to them. I was talking to Carl Helmers last week (we were at the same conference) and mentioned that once again there is probably a need for a journal like the one BYTE magazine started out to be. A place where folks to deconstruct the various offerings that manufacturers were putting out there and having discussions about worked and what didn't work in that space. Unfortunately magazines are somewhat out of favor and there hasn't been a really solid tech site to fill that particular niche.

37 points by tanglesome 13y ago

Excellent. The more competitors to the Pi the better. I've been nothing but disappointed by mine - it's slow, convoluted and totally unreliable. I do expect the opposite for the money when you can get a generic android tablet for not much more.

eephd 13y ago
Care to elaborate what kind of applications you are using your Pi for? Also which generic Android tablet can you buy for not much more than $25?
throwawayaway 13y ago
there's many ways of measuring speed, but for a two watt computer i find the speed more than adequate. in addition if you wish to use it as a desktop the long awaited wayland port should mitigate gui performance issues. i can't see the competitors being less convoluted than a debian install. if your hardware is unreliable you should make a repro to make it fail(i ran a performance benchmark in a loop on one i had trouble with til it crashed) and send it back to the manufacturer. the rpi's popularity, and low power consumption are it's selling points. i wonder what utility an android tablet provides than an rpi could be expected to.
- bananas 13y ago
  The thing is slow because the ARM core is tagged onto the side of the GPU. The chipset is designed for throwaway STB uses. The ARM core isny much faster than a 100MHz SPARC 20 I have. About 15% faster. The IO also sucks. For a general purpose computer it's painful. I posted instructions on how to make it fail on the RPi forum. My thread was deleted. The boot and video detection process is a total mess as well. Daring to suggest that is the case is frowned upon apparently as well as I was basically flamed for wanting to use composite video over HDMI. Bear in mind I didn't have an HDMI capable unit around and the thing is marketed as composite capable. Also I was getting USB brownouts with a powered hub connected. My thread was deleted. I've worked with embedded systems for a number of years and the RPi was a really low point in head bashing on wall. It's an awful platform. Its in the bin where it belongs.
  - throwawayaway 13y ago
    I am not sure what 'throwaway STB' means - something to do with phones? How many watts does your SPARC consume? I think the rpi makes a better stab at being a general purpose computer than an android tablet, and I think that the wayland port should improve it further. However I agree it's no replacement for a power hungry intel box. Post the instructions here, I will test on mine to see whether it's a general problem or just your box - there have been faulty ones shipped, but it's a tiny percentage of the total. Having threads deleted seems to be a common theme on popular forums, it doesn't usually signal a cover up - the moderators can take exception to your tone and then you have no recourse. When my rpi posts it seems to look for a hdmi cable, if none is present it outputs to the yellow composite - how does yours differ? I can't understand if you mean brownouts in terms of power or in terms of connectivity - what was dropping out? I can't say I have any experience with embedded systems but typically when people say that they aren't referring to computers that the rpi is comparable to - e.g. hdmi out, usb, ethernet. What were you doing with the embedded systems that you couldn't do with a pi?

chm 13y ago

I'm quite surprised the RPi team hasn't created a new model in two years. Sure they just released a new "compute module", but that's not destined to the same crowd. I'd like to see an RPi revision C. Other than that, do any of you know of a chip I could buy to program from scratch? I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor but I have no idea where to start. I heard M68Ks are nice.

jck 13y ago
What about one of the MSP430s?
tdicola 13y ago
You can't go wrong with an Arduino. You can use the Arduino IDE to get up to speed very quickly, and then later program it with avr-gcc and get rid of the Arduino bootloader/libraries if you desire. The next logical progression IMHO after Arduino/AVR chips is bare metal ARM development. Check out chips like the NXP LPC series which can be programmed with a free GCC toolchain, and more importably support on chip debugging with OpenOCD. Good getting started guide here: https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/introduction https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/i...
duskwuff 13y ago
M68K is dated. It's still used in some applications, but it's basically a dead end. ARM is where it's at these days. There's tons of ARM development hardware out there, but two cheap, awesome development boards I'd recommend might include: * The TI Tiva LaunchPad - http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c123gxl http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c123gxl * The STM32F4 Discovery - http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252419 http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252... Or, if you want to get adventurous, there's tons of ultra-cheap ARM development boards on eBay. You'll usually need to get your own JTAG adapter to work with them, and figuring out how to drive some of the peripherals may be a bit of an adventure, but the prices are unbeatable. (I paid about $40 for a "HY-STM32" board with a 3.2" touchscreen, for instance.)
Narishma 13y ago
They intentionally haven't released a new model, and don't plan to do so any time soon. They want to have a stable hardware platform, and spend time optimizing the software so it can benefit all the RPi owners, instead of continuously releasing new models and fragmenting the community.

tdicola 13y ago

Neat board, but I think it's going to be more useful for the media center/home server crowd than makers/hardware crowd. Some of the gripes I have: - Male header pins are kind of a pain to connect to a breadboard, at least compared to female pins on a Beaglebone Black or Arduino. - I'm assuming there's no analog to digital converter, like the Raspberry Pi, so that's annoying if you're reading analog sensors or other things. - Realtime support. Does the Allwinner A20 have any kind of realtime support microncontroller, kind of like PRU's on the Beaglebone Black? If not that's a bummer since interfacing with anything that has tight timing control (like lighting WS2811 LEDs) will be impossible or require more supporting circuitry. Don't get me wrong though, an open/hackable stick computer that's not expensive is still very interesting and useful to some folks.

pekk 13y ago
If the new part would be clearly useful for home servers, I would find that refreshing. "Makers" is not an actual use case. I always struggled to see exactly what Raspberry Pi was good for, that something else isn't better for.
- tdicola 13y ago
  "Makers" is not an actual use case. I don't agree with that--it might not be a use case to you, but is certainly a valid use case for these small development boards. Look at the success of Arduino, Maker Faire, 3D printing, DIY drones, etc. to see evidence of a large and vibrant DIY and maker community.
  - quanticle 13y ago
    I think a distinction can be drawn between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. I can see a use case for a (relatively) cheap, easy to program microcontroller with a board layout that makes it dead simple to integrate with sensors, motors, actuators, switches, etc. But that's an Arduino, not a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small ARM SoC that tries to be both a microcontroller and a general purpose computer and doesn't do either particularly well.

maratc 13y ago

$74 after shipping? Newegg will sell you a motherboard with a dual-core x86 CPU for $50 ($32 after rebate). With a new AMD AM1 platform, you can get a four-core x86 and a motherboard for $69. Raspberry Pi is a nice thing for $35. For $75, much nicer alternatives exist.

mongrelion 13y ago
Actually, I hadn't thought about this. My uncle's in need for a media center (he's already got the home theatre and the forty-something-inches LED T.V. and I was thinking of gettin'im a RPi with the rest of the fancy stuff but you totally would get waaaay better performance with a little bit more "expensive" board. The last time that I checked for this kind of solutions I was fancying some Zotac box but that one was ~US$350. Which $75, much nicer alternatives are you talking about here? :)
- pmjordan 13y ago
  The Intel NUCs are in a similar price range, especially once you take case, PSU, etc. into consideration. You can get them motherboard-only, but in the pre-built ones you just add RAM and Flash/HDD and you're done. The NUCs probably also win on overall power consumption, just check that you can use accelerated HD video decoding in the model you choose with the software you want to use.
  - dwild 13y ago
    There's Intel NUC cheap than 350$? Also case and PSU aren't a problem, either you get a Pico PSU for 50$ with a cheap case, or you take a case that include a PSU. They are cheap and the fan are noisy but for under $60... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154062 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154...
    - pmjordan 12y ago
      The RRP of the Intel NUC Kit DN2820FYKH is $128: http://ark.intel.com/products/78953/Intel-NUC-Kit-DN2820FYK?ui=BIG http://ark.intel.com/products/78953/Intel-NUC-Kit-DN2820FYK?... I believe that includes the Wifi/Bluetooth module already, but not the DDR3L RAM module or an SSD/HDD. If that model is missing something you need you can of course opt for one of the more expensive ones - there is a reasonable range. I'm considering getting one to act as a router, DD-WRT/OpenWRT on consumer/SOHO router hardware is incredibly fiddly. The power consumption of some of these devices is comparable.

Jack5500 13y ago

The English on the official BananaPi website troubles me...

sparkie 13y ago

Olimex already have a board based on this same SoC (and others from the same family of AllWinner SoCs), but unlike the Raspberry Pi, are completely open source hardware. (Banana Pi doesn't seem to be open, given the limited information too). The price is the same, and I'd much rather support open source hardware efforts. The schematics and Eagle files are on their github page. More info here: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO They're already working on a board for the next generation A31 SoC too.

frik 13y ago

I want a dual-core 1.4+ GHz ARM board with 2GB RAM (comparable to last years smartphones). Why is there no Raspberry Pi C announcement already? The type B is already a bit dated and who needs the "compute module"?

Narishma 13y ago
See my reply above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657271
- frik 13y ago
  They have already fragmented the type B model with releasing 256MB and later 512MB versions. They should just release an type C model with faster CPU and GPU. The type B model is too slow for some "Full HD" resolution computation of the official Rpi-Cam as well it is too slow for most Linux distributions (even basic web browsing). A ARM board version similar to Intel's first generation ATOM 320 (1.6 GHz dual core with HT) would be fine for "type C".

J_Darnley 13y ago

Who benefits from it though? When you buy a Raspberry Pi some of the money goes to the Foundation who then use it to promote programming in schools.

outside1234 13y ago

I actually don't want a faster version. What I want is a more energy efficient version (still ARM) with roughly the same performance that makes it feasible to run on batteries or solar. Does that exist?

lhl 13y ago
The current RPi A is about 2.5W, so already pretty cheap to solar power w a battery/small panel. Search for "solar rpi" etc to find lots of examples. Depending on your use case, the Beaglebone Black is a good alternative and idles at about 1W.
tdicola 13y ago
Go bare metal and make constant use of sleep modes. The less time your system is awake and running at full speed the better. There are some cool low power chips like the Tiny Gecko: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/lowpower/pages/efm32tg-tiny-gecko.aspx http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/lowpower/pages/efm32tg-ti... However you can probably get most chips down into the sub-milliamp range while asleep and run for months or more off a few batteries.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Why does it seem to be so difficult to run a Pi off of batteries? It draws less power than many phones. I was boggled that the Raspberry Pi AdaFruit store, which has dozens of different Pi-compatible displays, keyboards, cases, and exotic sensors and output devices, doesn't have a single external battery pack.
- throwawayaway 13y ago
  it doesn't seem to be difficult: check out this thread or google for hamish cunningham. http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=25674 http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=25674
higherpurpose 13y ago
I imagine a 800-1,000 Mhz Cortex A53 version would be 0.5-1W, if they decided to make one for next year. But not sure if that's their target market. They will probably keep power consumption about the same, and launch one at a higher clock speed, perhaps even as dual-core, to better run other distros on it (such as Ubuntu).

amit_m 13y ago

I was hoping for a cheaper board. Even if the Raspberry Pi foundation were to just take the old model A and drop the analog I/O ports and LED lights - with their economies of scale and the natural decrease in chip prices, I'm guessing they could ship a ~20$ board.

tdicola 13y ago
There is no analog I/O on the Raspberry Pi. You can do PWM output on a pin, but otherwise no analog input or output. There really isn't much to drop from the model A--it's just the processor and supporting passive components with some headers, connectors, etc. edit: I guess you could drop the analog video and sound output, but that would probably just save a few cents for the connectors.

apapli 13y ago

For those more technical than I, is there actually any benefit in having the 1000Mbps NIC on a board with still a relatively slow processor? I fear the processor can't handle anywhere near that amount of throughout that NIC could support, so to me it looks like a feature for the sake of being different to the Pi.

dfox 13y ago
At the minimum it is useful because it is connected to CPU/memory by something more meaningful than USB as is the case with Raspberry Pi. Also for many interesting workloads (essentially anything that involves scatter-gather DMA from some other peripheral, eg. routing, file/storage server) you don't need that much powerful CPU to saturate gigabit ethernet.
- apapli 13y ago
  Thanks!

dfc 13y ago

Where are all the perfunctory Betteridge's law comments?

InclinedPlane 13y ago

One of the cool things about arduino lately is that they're getting cheap enough and small enough to just use as part of finished projects, instead of just as learning tools or prototypes. The neat thing about raspberry pi was that it offered a similar proposition, except instead of a microcontroller you could bring to bear the full power of a computer running linux. I'm more excited to see smaller, lower power, and cheaper versions of the pi than more powerful and more expensive versions. Because that's what will result in them being used in projects more.

Codhisattva 13y ago

"Faster" versus "Fast Enough"

explorigin 13y ago

Be careful with the Allwinner processors. The Cubieboard has some serious network speed issues. Do some homework before you expect to make a router or high-bandwidth server.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

> the $35 Raspberry Pi, which was introduced in 2012, with its 700MHz ARM11 processor and 512MBs of RAM, is looking a little dowdy these days. Someone has fundamentally understood the reason that the Pi exists. Also, these guys have immediately blown their trustworthiness by deliberately creating confusion between their brand and an established one ("[fruit] Pi").

PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Ugh. That should say "misunderstood," of course.

kkh 13y ago

This is probably as good a thread as any to ask which single-board ARM computer has the best performance/price ratio, preferably one that's more powerful than the Raspberry Pi and can do duty as an everyday system.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Interesting set of comments. Clearly the RasPi does what it does, for those who want that, really well. As embedded/single board computers go, it has been very successful. The flavor of comments about the Banana[sic] Pi are very similar to those made about PCs, especially in the earlier days, of the form "I want it to be more like <computer I'm used to>." I have come to believe that this is really a form of saying "I want the computer I have at the price of this computer which can't do what I can do on the one I'm using." Sort of a having cake and eating it too sort of comment. Looking at the various entrants in this space, the Pi, the Beaglebone Black, the Galileo, Etc it is clear to me that manufacturers are exploring this space. Its unfortunate that there isn't a lot of coherent feedback to them. I was talking to Carl Helmers last week (we were at the same conference) and mentioned that once again there is probably a need for a journal like the one BYTE magazine started out to be. A place where folks to deconstruct the various offerings that manufacturers were putting out there and having discussions about worked and what didn't work in that space. Unfortunately magazines are somewhat out of favor and there hasn't been a really solid tech site to fill that particular niche.