
Two million Raspberry Pi sold - alexandros
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5265
======
Theodores
One of those two million is sat under my desk, collecting dust. I know a few
others that are, and, I wonder what percentage of that 2 million are in the
same situation?

Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major
disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be.
Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of
illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.

I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure,
everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not
a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just
one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to
getting started.

It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a
few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot
about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially
expected.

What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware
virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it
into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever
web/hardware development needed.

~~~
johnchristopher
> What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware
> virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug
> it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever
> web/hardware development needed.

But it is. My Pi's are running headless and I access them over Ethernet. They
suck less power than a VM running on a more powerful hardware and that's the
point.

edit: I admit that it's easier for Web dev than for HW dev. I'd use Arduino
for HW hobbies before a Pi if the project can be done with both.

~~~
mrbill
The Beaglebone / BB Black does exactly this - you can have it connected with a
single USB cable.

~~~
Theodores
Thanks for that - a very tempting option, not in stock right now with RS
Components in the UK, but seems the price of a months hire for a VPS, give or
take, and roughly the same spec - therefore perfect for dev work where
performance needs to be targeted.

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Ihmahr
I am running two Tor nodes on two raspberries:

[https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B679923178D2B63F22C984...](https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B679923178D2B63F22C98489E689E1F91B899624)

[https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/0A7028F6600F940D1A680A...](https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/0A7028F6600F940D1A680AEBCD928509A17AE8FC)

A single pi can push about 600 kb/s. This includes a lot of circuit requests
and other encryption. Thinking of buying some more.

~~~
lurker1
Interesting - I've been thinking about doing this for a while. So I take it
from the atlas page that you are running a standard (non-exit) relay?

~~~
Ihmahr
Yes. As you can see my first relay started out as an exit relay, but my
fascist ISP (whom I can not choose or contact) kept on blocking my router's
mac address, which made my relay unstable. Since I am not an exit anymore the
relay has been running fine.

~~~
gaadd33
You can't contact your ISP? Will they contact you if you stop paying?

~~~
Ihmahr
I wish and I would. But I am co-located with facilities I cannot choose. (Yes,
I am a student). Also housing is too difficult to be able to move out.

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melling
What's the plan for future devices? It would be great if some low cost device
like this would have a 12-18 month upgrade cycle and create the sort of buzz
as an Apple or Samsung device. Moore's law has benefits at $30 too. Maybe
release a $99 version every year then make last year's model available at $35.
Get Intel involved? They're really working hard to get into low-power devices.

~~~
Derbasti
Yes! I am waiting desperately for a Raspberry Pi with an updated CPU!

~~~
ChuckMcM
What about the CPU are you waiting for? Higher performance? 64 bit vs 32 bit?
And what is the application that is made possible by that you can't do now?

~~~
Derbasti
More cores, mostly. I tried using the Raspberry Pi with server software such
as Owncloud or calendarserver. It just barely works, but it is still _very_
slow. Like, response times upwards of four seconds.

Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and
quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times
below a second, which would be much appreciated.

~~~
justincormack
Its not really that slow; try different software. Low power means you need to
be slightly efficient.

~~~
mtgx
Well, for today's software, it kind of is slow. Its IPC performance is about 1
DMIPS/Mhz vs ~3.5 for the latest high-end ARM chips, which also have 3x the
clock speed of RPi, and come in quad-core variety. Do the math. That's a
10x-40x delta. Of course such a board wouldn't cost $30 anymore, but they
could still improve performance by at least 3x with another low-end, but more
modern, CPU, even as single core, but even more as dual-core or quad-core.
Even a single core Cortex A7 at 1.2 Ghz would be about 3x faster than
Raspberry Pi (90 percent faster IPC * 70 percent faster clock speed).

Personally, I think they should wait until they can make a dual-core 1.5 Ghz
Cortex A53 with 1 GB of RAM for $25, which may be possible by 2015, and maybe
a quad-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 one with 2 GB of RAM (and perhaps a few extra
stuff), for under $50 (I would make it for $40-$45 so the total cost with
shipping and whatnot still remains under $50 for most people, instead of going
over that price point). A single core Cortex A53 at 1.5 Ghz (its stock clock
speed) would be ~5x faster, and also 64-bit. By the way, Cortex A7 and Cortex
A53 are both the true successors of the ARM11 CPU RPi is using, and they serve
the same markets.

The $25-$50 market, is still probably their _best_ market, since a lot more
companies compete at the $100-$200 level.

~~~
justincormack
Kind of slow, but the OP is talking about seconds in response time, something
is going badly wrong. Software issues not CPU throughput. It doesn't help that
IO is terrible, there is no point putting in a faster CPU without SATA and a
bit more throughput overall.

They are in a great position for volume, so should be able to do better than
the current choice that was suboptimal in so may ways. Not clear that the 64
bit stuff will be that cheap soon (plus porting code will take a while) but it
depends when they are going to do something. Cheap is important.

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whyenot
I am using two of those two million RPis with camera modules to record
pollinators visiting flowers (backpackable; activated by motion; solar
powered). I'm still ironing out some kinks with the software, but the quality
of footage produce by the camera module, the low power requirements and the
flexibility you get with the RPi are really pretty amazing considering the
price.

~~~
possibilistic
Do you have any pictures or footage? I'd love to see.

~~~
guipinto
I use a camera module to capture and catalog a daily timelapse video of the
sky and weather above Boston:
[http://guipinto.com/skylapse](http://guipinto.com/skylapse)

~~~
shutupalready
That's really excellent.

Is this website being fed in real-time by the RPi?

What framework/tool are you using to create the UI for your website?

~~~
guipinto
I have the raspi collecting images every 5 seconds, then shipping them off to
a local box i'm dedicating to render the videos using ffmpeg (ffmpeg -r 30 -i
"images_*.jpg" [+ x264 and crf at 23]). Then I ship them off to S3 for
storage/serving. The UI was custom built and is still very bare right now.
Simply includes HTML5-video object with 2 video options (ogv and mp4). The
quality of the rendered video, as well as capture settings (controlling
exposure instead of auto, etc.) still needs a lot of work, and this is an
ongoing project for me.

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blisterpeanuts
I got a Pi and a case and connected it via a USB-to-MIDI cable to my
electronic piano, and now I can play and record performances to midi files on
the Pi. Really cool. It basically gave my piano a technology update so I don't
have to spend hundreds of dollars for one of those newer keyboards with a USB
port.

My next mini-project is to build a web app that can run these midi tools and
list the performances in a nice UI, so that I can control the piano with a
tablet or phone on the wifi network (using something other than an SSH
terminal).

I am thinking of getting a couple of other Pi's for webcam use. I had one
hooked up to a cam but it kept dying for some reason. Maybe because of the
cheap wifi dongle.

It's an amazing little gadget and the sky's the limit on what you can do with
it.

~~~
snom380
Ah cool, I do the same thing (with arecordmidi)! Would really love a web
interface if you make one.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
I'll try to remember to reply here when I get it working.

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joezydeco
I'd like to hear a little about the educational successes that RPi may have
achieved since launch. That was the goal, right?

~~~
sean-duffy
My university sent out all the new computer science undergraduates a RPi each
and held two challenges at the start of term, here's a video of the event:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgjbiBG2sf8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgjbiBG2sf8)
.

~~~
calv
My university gave us all one when we arrived. It's just been gaining dust as
my laptop runs Linux and I just do all my programming on there. That and if I
wanted to do a hobby project, I have coursework to do.

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royjacobs
I absolutely love how ubiquitous these things have become. They're genuinely
useful for a lot of different purposes but, to me personally, I like how eco
they are. I realize this sounds a bit eco-hipster, but I really mean it:
Whereas people used to have big media center machines under their TVs, you can
just pop a Pi underneath your TV, install RaspBMC, and that's all you need. It
takes 3-4w, nothing more. Lovely.

Having said that, a 60" TV and surround sound receiver will probably also take
a least a few watts, if I had to guesstimate :)

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ck2
What's great is now you can just pop onto Amazon, order a model B for $40
shipped and have it at your door in 48 hours.

~~~
masmullin
Try element14. 1/2 the shipping time for $8, and you can order a tonne of
other electronics stuff for the same shipping price too. Very good customer
service if anything goes wrong too.

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JetSetWilly
I have found mine very useful. It turned my old USB printer into a fancy-pants
wifi printer. It has been running tiny-tiny rss since google reader shutdown.
It runs an irc bouncer for me. It runs a dyndns updater for me much better
than my buggy router.

It would also run an rss-full-article-fetcher process I wrote but it turns out
to be impossible-mission to get ghc to compile or cross-compile anything for
arm.

I've found it really useful for lots of low-power bandaid solutions to various
problems I have had.

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roel_v
How reliable are they as always-on 'servers' wrt running off an sd card?
Doesn't it wear out the card in a few months time if you consider all the
writing to /var/log? Anyone had one running for close to the two year's it's
been out now?

~~~
Maakuth
I think there is wear leveling that's pretty similar to SSDs. If you use a
filesystem without journaling, it shouldn't be an issue. If the wear leveling
is good enough, it could be that even with journaling, there's no problem. One
could of course use jffs2 or another flash fs that has wear leveling in it if
it proves to be a problem.

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rcarmo
Too bad that miscellaneous issues prevent them from getting an Android port
out -- regardless of RAM and CPU requirements, I've been trying to get a
decent accelerated web view going on it since I first got one, and _nothing_
works well enough (Qt5 took forever to stabilise - and still isn't quite there
yet, X11 still has no hardware acceleration, there are no browsers that take
advantage of Wayland, Firefox OS is still not stable enough, and even the
JavaFX preview ships without a web view).

But hey, they can play back video pretty OK, so I eventually settled on a mix
of video and live streaming a desktop browser rendered on a normal PC:

[http://the.taoofmac.com/space/hw/RaspberryPi/Streaming](http://the.taoofmac.com/space/hw/RaspberryPi/Streaming)

Thing is, omxplayer crashes out of the blue for no apparent reason (either
halts the player process or locks up the RPi _completely_, on any hardware
rev) and have an alarming tendency to corrupt SD cards, so I'm moving to the
Beaglebone Black ASAP.

They do make very nice low-power servers (I have one doing AirPrint via CUPS
for iOS devices), though, and of course I try out a bunch of things on mine -
if it runs quickly enough on a Pi, then it's blisteringly fast on a "normal"
machine.

~~~
masmullin
I've had Android running on the BBB.

The BBB's main issue is the lack of support from TI for the graphics chip.
Android is 'acceptable' on BBB, but the lack of hardware accel graphics puts a
major damper on the fun (aka no youtube).

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middleclick
I would love to get a Raspberry Pi but I don't know what I would like to do
with it. Suggestions?

~~~
stadeschuldt
Log temperatures in your apartment/house:
[http://thule.mine.nu/html/](http://thule.mine.nu/html/)

~~~
middleclick
Woah, really neat. Thanks!

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cabbeer
Would I notice any performance gain from using a cheap pc over a pi for
something like BT sync?

The Pi's processor is equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium 2, and that's kinds
scary.

~~~
noselasd
Certainly. The RPI is not able to even remotely saturate its network card + a
USB harddrive.

~~~
vjoel
Especially with an encrypted disk.

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mtgx
I wonder when they plan to make one based on Cortex A53/ARMv8. I assume
sometime in 2015, to get it a little cheaper?

~~~
happycube
The Pi already has a trailing-edge ARMv6 SoC for cost reasons. They'll
probably be reluctant to move until the fab line used to make the current chip
shuts down.

And Arduino is still very popular with a much simpler chip.

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lanewinfield
Although perhaps better suited for arduino, I have one sensing bathroom
availability in my old office. [http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-
graf](http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-graf)

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source99
Who is buying these? 2 Million is way above hobbiest usage.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Actually not above 'hobbiest' usage. Its comparable to sales of other
comparable things like Arduinos which have sold north of 2M units at this
point if you count all the variations.

That said, like the Arduino, there are a small mix of custom-commercial uses
in there, some educational where the units are purchased as part of a
curriculum, and of course some 'novelty' purchases where people think "I
should get one of these" and then never use it again.

So it has good penetration in the hobbiest market which, depending on who you
believe is 3 to 5 million 'seats'.

~~~
aerolite
hobbyist

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atmosx
A website to buy second hand Pi in bulk might work.

~~~
eyeareque
Or a place to donate all of the ones that are collecting dust. Like other
commenters have said, I'm sure computer departments at community colleges
could use them.

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dil8
I just got mine on the weekend! I have it set as a home theater PC with
Rasbmc, so far I am absolutely loving it.

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thearn4
Great little boards, I use these as mini portable file servers/Git hosts in my
lab.

