5 ms·

I still can't see why would anyone buy one except as one of those toys that you buy and then gets tossed in the closet. 10 years ago I could see the appeal, but

• seanp2k2 12y ago
  I can run python on it. Yes, I'm aware of http://www.pymcu.com/index.html http://www.pymcu.com/index.html , but they're cheap enough for projects and familiar enough for people vaguely familiar with Linux that it ends up being a good combination for lots of fun projects. It's probably overkill for >90% of things people use it for, but usability is the big advantage.
• vlad003 12y ago
  My understanding is that the Raspberry Pis are intended to be used in education. The front page says: "We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn how computers work, how to manipulate the electronic world around them, and how to program." That said, I use mine as a simple NAS for backups.
  • jiggy2011 12y ago
    The problem is that it's too slow to be used as an actual development computer, so you have to write your code on another computer and then copy it over to the pi.
    • tdicola 12y ago
      Check out sshfs or similar user-mode filesystems to make the Pi look like a drive. Cyberduck is another tool that has a decent file explorer UI around SSH/SFTP and is cross platform. If you're writing C/C++ you can set up a cross compilation tool chain to write and compile code on any Linux machine. It's a pain but there are lots of blogs posts and guides on it.
      • jiggy2011 12y ago
        Sure, but I mean you already need another computer in order to program the pi at which point you already have a computer that can run programs without the pi.
    • ibisum 12y ago
      "Too slow"? Thats a very consumer-centric point of view. Compiling onboard is quite sufficient for most small projects, and really .. its a matter of patience, but for sure its quite usable. For those more used to the fat-IDE approach, where everything is done for you at a few clicks, its certainly not interesting .. but if you want to get really familiar with software development, doing things onboard the rPi can be a very effective way to develop. The so-called limitations of the device can also work in your favour: write smaller, tighter, leaner modules, and you don't have to wait so long in between compiles. Not to mention that there are plenty of ways to use the rPi that don't require compiling. I myself use an onboard Lua environment, which just plain rocks .. ssh in, open up vim, edit Lua .. run in another terminal. Quite a comfortable environment, and I hardly even care that its on a 'small/slow CPU' (after all, I lost interest in the speed race decades ago. Those of us who grew up building the Linux kernel on MHz-class machines don't feel your pain.)
      • jiggy2011 12y ago
        Hooking the Pi up to a monitor and using it to actually edit on is extremely slow, once you've loaded an editor a browser a couple of terminals and maybe an MP3 player it's a crawl compared to devices anyone is used to in 2014.
        • ibisum 12y ago
          I don't, ever, even think about lag in between :w and :ma .. these things just plain work. For everything else, there's 'cscope -R -s /usr/include #&etc'. For pure C/C++ projects, I use cscope+vim+make on the rPi. For Lua projects, just vim .. and a few judicious 'watch ./ make' style sub-cmds in another shell. GUI editors are not your friend, I accept that. But there is more beneath the hood than such a dilemna as not enough RAM to load bitmaps ..
• greyman 12y ago
  My colleague uses it to run a python script to periodically download and store virtual currency prices. As I understand it, it is useful if you want to download stuff from the internet in certain time intervals.
  • tlrobinson 12y ago
    There are roughly a billion ways to "download stuff from the internet in certain time intervals", but if for some reason the machine needs to be physically present, and dedicated to that task, then a Raspberry Pi is probably the cheapest way to do it.
• tdicola 12y ago
  Running Linux in embedded projects is still super useful. You can use pretty advanced software like speech recognition (PocketSphinx, etc.), image processing (OpenCV), and more to make cool stuff that would be miserable/nearly impossible to implement bare metal on a fast CPU. Even networking heavy or UI heavy projects would be much easier on a machine that runs a real operating system.
• lovelearning 12y ago
  I built my own home security system with a Pi as the brains to control camera streaming and do face recognition using OpenCV. Is there a $5 microcontroller that can do all that? Admittedly, it's a big load on the Pi and I'm looking for more powerful single board computers, but that again eliminates $5 MCUs. I have another Pi working as a drop-in replacement wifi router that routes data via a USB data dongle in case my main internet connection fails. This too may be too much to ask from a $5 MCU.
  • Khaine 12y ago
    That sounds awesome! Would you mind sharing your project?
    • lovelearning 12y ago
      I've been planning to write about them on a blog, but haven't started yet. Hopefully sometime soon.
• weland 12y ago
  I don't have the Raspberry Pi, mainly because, since I develop embedded software for a living, I have an endless supply of development boards I can hack on at work and am free to take home (during those evenings when I am not so fucking tired of flipping bits that I don't even want to SEE C code!), but: * A platform with less legacy crap than x86 is wonderful for learning about OS development. I don't know how the Pi fares for this, with Broadcom's chip and all, but if I had the free time to hack an OS in my spare time, not dealing with all the thirty year-old cruft nor shedding a gazillion EUR on a PowerPC system would be ideal. * There's a legitimate audience of visual artists, musicians or just tinkerers who, as outrageous as might sound to us, long-bearded bit twiddlers, find learning anything other than Python either hopelessly complicated or just not refreshing enough. Aye, their needs would be better served by a 5-dollar MCU, but when an extra twenty dollars buying you the ability to write the code on the same computer that runs it, it's hard to resist. I find myself breaking the sacred oath of not using even one bit more than I need, too, because it's Saturday and my cat wants some attention too and I derive far more pleasure from seeing the jukebox playing music than from knowing the half-done file loader module that will eventually be part of a jukebox eighteen Saturdays from now on is so optimized that even an optimizing compiler would slash its veins in envy. * The "cheap webserver" part is generally useful when you actually want one to interface something with the outside world over the Interwebs. I find the idea of using HTTP for much of this rather... repugnant, but there are people to whom it isn't, and a VPS isn't of much use if the requirement is to toggle this relay in response to that HTTP request.
  • userbinator 12y ago
    > A platform with less legacy crap than x86 is wonderful for learning about OS development. I don't know how the Pi fares for this, with Broadcom's chip and all, but if I had the free time to hack an OS in my spare time, not dealing with all the thirty year-old cruft nor shedding a gazillion EUR on a PowerPC system would be ideal. Actually I'd say the x86/PC is probably one of the best-documented and most stable platforms out there to learn on at the moment, precisely because it has been around for so long. Largely due to Broadcom policy the Pi is notoriously closed and proprietary at the hardware level, and unless there is somehow a massive amount of reverse-engineering like what happened with early home computers (which were better documented so the process started more easily), or a datasheet leak, the situation is unlikely to change. Any of the other open ARM devboards in the same price range would also be good candidates for OS development, but not the Pi.
• malaporte 12y ago
  I've been using a Pi running XBMC for about a year. It's connected to a big hard drive. I can copy stuff there from my laptop (movies, music, etc.) It works pretty well; I don't remember having to "service" it in any way since I plugged it in. It works fine to stream stuff from YouTube, too. Shows for kids, etc. The XBMC remote on my phone is pretty handy too. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.
  • mhurron 12y ago
    Does it handle HD content?
    • lmedinas 12y ago
      Yes, using omxplayer and XBMC.
    • antocv 12y ago
      Yes, yes it does play HD movies well. Even streaming them.
• mikehall314 12y ago
  I have one which I use as a VPN terminator for the office.
• pjc50 12y ago
  The use case of the Pi is a computer that can be given to small children to be theirs, to be a counterpart to the BBC Micro of thirty years ago. It's also an attempt to get right what the OLPC people got wrong (too expensive, too different from all other systems). It has to have a decent display, which really rules out microcontrollers (an early prototype was indeed an AVR that ran Lua and output composite video). It has to be cheap, and indeed it is cheaper than all the other full-fledged Linux boards with larger processors and more RAM.
  • koralatov 12y ago
    > The use case of the Pi is a computer that can be given to small > children to be theirs, I completely agree with this part... > to be a counterpart to the BBC Micro of thirty years ago. But I don't really agree with this part. The BBC Micro was much more expensive in real terms when it launched, and never got down to an equivalent price during its lifespan. Only when it became a hand-me-down, replaced by something more powerful, did it have become the property of a kid. (I saw this happen with several friends.) The Pi is something new --- its the first computer truly designed to be owned by almost all kids, from new. It's so cheap, and uses equipment most people have already (especially the TV), that only the very poorest can't afford one, and it's cheap enough that destroying one whilst tinkering isn't a disaster.
    • pjc50 12y ago
      Well yes, we've had 30 years of cost reduction, but "play the same social role as the BBC Micro in computer education in the UK" was the goal of the Foundation.
    • VLM 12y ago
      "became a hand-me-down" Speaking of "hand-me-down", the pi kind of kills the used/junker PC marketplace for little experimental projects, when you can work on your project instead of debugging old/worn out hardware for only $40 or so. Also it uses about 1/10th the power of a repurposed desktop, so why not. For an experiment, I could pick up a free, dusty, worn out desktop that draws 100 watts and stick a new small/tiny hard drive in it for about $50 and have a giant paperweight that needs hardware troubleshooting, or spend the same cash on something tiny that draws about as much power as a clock radio and is new so presumably more reliable. Its hard to justify picking up junker "free" PCs in the era of the pi.
• TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I made a home heating controller with temp plotting and frost alarm out of a couple of Pis. I don't think a $5 microcontroller would have run a tiny web server, tiny email server, or the plotter code that forms the core of the project. The Pi is a fine budget Linux computer. It's not fast, it's not powerful, it's not expensive. But it's fast enough and powerful enough for embedded applications you can put online without breaking a sweat.
  • mnw21cam 12y ago
    That sounds cool. Do you have any more details of the home heating project? I'm considering doing something similar.
    • TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      I bolted some 10A 5V relays onto the GPIO pins via a 3V3-5V converter board to switch the heating circuits on and off. There are some standard 1-wire temp sensors - docs are easy to find online. The 1-wire protocol allows for really long cabling and doesn't need external power, so it's ideal for this kind of project There's some incredibly simple Python code controlling the relays and reading the sensors, and GNUPLOT runs off a cron job to plot the temperatures to image files that get served in a web page via lighttpd. Because I don't have a static IP at home the Pi pings my Linode server with its IP address every minute, and the Pi server web pages are wrapped in an iframe that pulls them off the current home IP. The whole thing is a total hack, but it works well enough. Bottom line is I can see the indoor/pipe/tank/outdoor temps from anywhere, and the heating turns on if it thinks the pipes are going to freeze, and turns off if the water in the tank and/or room temps are warm enough. I can also turn the heating on and off remotely. It wasn't quite trivial to do, but it wasn't a hair-tearing challenge either. So far as I can tell, it was easier than it would have been with alternative boards. Basically anyone who knows beginner-level Linux server set-up and some very basic electronics should be able to build something like this around the Pi. It's perfect for this kind of embedded micro-server/controller project.
      • mnw21cam 12y ago
• gnaffle 12y ago
  Here are a couple of use cases: - Stick it on the back of your 3D printer and run OctoPrint on it to give a nice web interface for your 3D printer (and a web cam for time lapse capture). - Connect it to my digital piano to record playing sessions and upload the MIDI files automatically to dropbox without me having to push any buttons except the "on" button on the piano. There are a thousand other use cases where you want something more than a microcontroller, you just have to use your imagination!
• fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  I'm currently putting together a data recorder for an academic experiment. It requires: GPS, Camera, Environmental data, inclinometer, and a few other odd bits. I could build up a custom system, but that is a big NRE expense for something that less than ten of will probably ever be produced. I could also use a "better" but less common developer board, but that path has its own problems. The experimenter could have stuck with a COTS solution, but the reason that I'm working on it now is the inconvenience and poor quality of the current implementation (lots of COTS stuff bodged together). Currently, they are using a lot of COTS stuff, and then putting the data together in batches. Even though it is a somewhat automated process, it remains slow, labor-intensive, tedious, fragile, etc. When I am done, I get to hand off an integrated, fully automated system that is flexible, built with easily replaceable parts, and best of all; due to the abundance of freely shared examples and documents, a grad student, or even an ambitious undergrad can take over and manage or even customize the system. Also, the rPi based system is much cheaper than the current system. So, there is one pretty good use for an rPi.
• throwketchup 12y ago
  It's a valid question, not sure why you're being down voted. It nicely fills the use case of "I could totally run this project from an 80 cent microcontroller, except that it needs network connectivity, and the only practical way to do that in my environment is with 802.11 or 802.3." The Raspberry Pi designers made a bunch of, IMHO, totally bone-headed design decisions early on (e.g., RTC "costs too much", but let's throw on a bunch of expensive ZIF connectors for overpriced peripherals that nobody will use) and the B+ is a move in the right direction to fix that. My use case is "wifi terminal server." Which is to say that I built a battery-powered RPi system to connect Sky Safari on my iPad to a go-to telescope. The official Sky Safari wifi peripheral is $180 and can't even act as an access point! With the RPi, I have a better uart bridge (in that it runs hostapd) for one third the cost of the official solution. Plus, there is the possibility of adding auto-guiding using the gpio pins and some hacking.