
Introducing Raspberry Pi B+ - benn_88
http://www.raspberrypi.org/introducing-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus/
======
schappim
What's the same:

\- Same Broadcom BCM2835 Chipset

\- Same 512MB RAM

\- Same full size HDMI port

\- Same 10/100 Ethernet port

\- Same CSI camera port and DSI display ports

\- Same micro USB power supply connection

What has changed:

\- Now comes with 4 USB ports so you can now connect more devices than ever to
your Raspberry Pi.

\- There is a 40pin extended GPIO so you can build even bigger and better
projects than ever before. The first 26 pins are identical to the Model B to
provide 100% backward compatibility for your projects.

\- Micro SD slot instead of the full size SD slot for storing information and
loading your operating systems.

\- Advanced power management:

-You can now provide up to 1.2 AMP to the 4 USB ports

– enabling you to connect more power hungry USB devices without needing an
external USB hub. (This feature requires a 2Amp micro USB Power Supply)

\- The B+ board now uses less power (600mA) than the Model B Board (750mA)
when running

\- Combined 4-pole jack for connecting your stereo audio out and composite
video out

(Source: [http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-
mod...](http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-model-b-
plus))

[Edited for formatting]

~~~
kephra
I'm still missing a normal round power plug, as the ramshackly micro USB draws
much more power then the allowed 500mA.

Also Ethernet is still connected via USB, and horrible slow.

~~~
durin42
The Ethernet chip is a new one tho - maybe it's a little less terrible?

(No idea - my applications for the rpi don't depend on it being a speed demon
on the network.)

~~~
tlrobinson
Any recommendations for similar small/cheap devices with better Ethernet?

~~~
fanf2
Have a look at the Beaglebone Black.

------
pjc50
While we're here, I'd like to call attention to the fact that the Pi
foundation has hired someone to opensource the X display driver, addressing
one of the common criticisms about openness:

[http://anholt.livejournal.com/44239.html](http://anholt.livejournal.com/44239.html)

~~~
Narishma
They hired him to create an open source driver, not to open source the current
one.

------
CalRobert
For people saying they want a faster revision - do remember there are other
computers in this form factor. I recently got an Odroid U3 and am very happy
with it. Of course, it's $65, not $35. I tried setting up owncloud, nginx, a
web server, etc. on a Pi and it couldn't handle it (everything ran, but
terribly), the Odroid does well.

I still like the Pi, though. There are some people for whom saving $30 really
does make a big difference, and if the goal is learning how computers work,
having lots of GPIO pins, etc, the Pi is still awesome.

~~~
TD-Linux
The Rpi is now a totally open source platform though, unlike the Odroid. Same
for the Novena laptop.

Also, I've heard bad things about the Odroid's stability under load. Do you
have any problems? I've also definitely had problems with the Rpi under load,
but I expect the new switching power supply to solve that.

~~~
zapt02
I've had horrible experiences with Pi over load. SD card corruption very
often. Tried various power bricks and several Pi's, always same issue -
corrupt SD card after a couple of months of 24/7 use.

Have an Odroid U2 running now for 6 months on an eMMC card without any issues.
I know which one I prefer. :)

~~~
cheapsteak
Out of curiosity, what are you guys using it for?

~~~
zapt02
VPN Gateway!

------
billpg
Is the next one going to be called the Raspberry Pi Master System? Let me know
when they introduce the Raspberry Pi Archimedes.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Eventually there will be a Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi.

Let's hope it handles tail recursion.

~~~
e12e
Raspberry Tau?

~~~
lytedev
This tickled my cleverness center.

------
xorcist
The Pi would be infititely more useful to me if the ethernet interface was
attached to a "real" bus and not hung on USB. Here's to hoping that will be
the next upgrade!

~~~
pja
Which bus exactly? Reading the BCM2835 datasheet (
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/BCM283...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf) ) the chip has a couple
of UARTS, 2 SPI interfaces and a USB interface.

The only interface that can do DMA is the USB one. All the others have
relatively small FIFO buffers and require the CPU to do all the I/O work. So
you could attach an ethernet interface to one of the SPI buses, or bit bang a
few GPIOs but surely the CPU load is going to be painful?

Edit: Oh wait, there's a main SPI bus that can do DMA as well. See page 148 on
the doc linked above. If you can find a suitable chipset & driver then have at
it :)

~~~
userbinator
The internal bus - AMBA/AXI/etc., so it's basically another peripheral block
the CPU can access directly.

(That datasheet is also _very_ incomplete - there's lots of other interesting
stuff in the SoC like the MIPI CSI/DSI interface, and if you felt perverse
enough and had the right skillset you might be able to get Ethernet-like data
transfer out of one of those...)

------
Nux
Oh man, I was really hoping for a better CPU. The current one is just so dang
slow.

~~~
userbinator
Slow and proprietary, which is not a great combination... there's a lot of
interesting new ARM SoCs from China that are coming out, like the Allwinner
A3x series (quad A7s, >1GHz). It would be pretty unlikely for one of those to
show up in the next Pi though; if anything, it'll probably be another
Broadcom.

~~~
goldenkey
Ebon Upton [0], one of the main folk from the Raspberry Pi foundation works
for Broadcom and does SoC. So odds are slim considering that connection
probably enabled them to get extreme price arrangements otherwise not doable.

[0]
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation)

~~~
WatchDog
His Broadcom relationship is probably much less relevant now that the
foundation has some money in the bank and a product that has achieved wide
spread success.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Exactly, there shouldn't be any trouble getting a vendors attention now.

------
notthetup
Adafruit has a nice overview of what's changed.

[https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-
mode...](https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus-
plus-differences-vs-model-b)

------
tezza
I went for a BeagleBone Black because I could communicate with the device over
the same USB that powered it.

It doesn't look as though they have made the RPI B+ communicate over the power
line, are there plans for future versions to do so ?

~~~
Ecco
"communicate with the device over the same USB that powered it." That's the
biggest issue with the RPi and they still haven't fixed it…

------
kenrikm
I hope the USB ports will now output enough voltage to actually power common
peripherals without using a hub.

~~~
ekianjo
Not sure if this is the case since they announced "reduced power consumption"
?

~~~
ibrahima
When they say reduced power consumption, they're really talking about
overhead. Let's say to supply 5W at 5V, they needed to take in 7W at 120V.
This means that voltage step down process results in some power being wasted
as heat. By using a switching regulator they waste less power and thus there's
less heat output, but the power delivered to the device remains the same. So,
in this example, they might only need to take in 6W at 120V to output 5W at
5V. (Note, the numbers are complete BS because I haven't done hardware in a
while, but that should give you an idea.)

~~~
pjc50
The numbers are referring to the wrong voltages entirely. It takes in 5V and
down-converts that to 3.3V, 2.5V and 1.8V.

[https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-
mode...](https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus-
plus-differences-vs-model-b?view=all#power-supply)

------
praeivis
I got surprised B+ cost same as B, and they even keep B in production. That,
what I miss from other manufacturers in modern world.

~~~
makomk
They'd probably piss off a lot of their developer community if they didn't
keep the B in production. There's a huge number of third-party cases and
projects that are built around the original connector arrangement.

~~~
SuddsMcDuff
[http://www.kano.me/](http://www.kano.me/) is a prime example of this. It
would have been the worst possible timing for them if the model B was
discontinued.

------
thecrumb
I wonder if this would run a Quake (3) server? Myself and a few of my friends
still like to play the old classic... $35 seems ideal for something I could
just leave on all the time for a quick game.

~~~
kreddor
Sure, why not? It runs the Quake 3 client rather well actually.

------
DCKing
Curious they're explicitly naming this the "final evolution".

First up, I'd be surprised if they continued with a "Raspberry Pi 2" soon. The
RPi is still very adequate for its original goals in education and will likely
remain so; it hasn't ever been quite enough for people wanting a cheap server
or media center except for those with very modest needs. Given their announced
goals, I doubt that the creators are going to cater to the second group with a
hypothetical RPi 2.

One thing that can be improved upon the original Pi is a more open SoC, but
currently no SoC vendor will be able to provide a significantly more open one.
Even if you pick an open source friendly SoC vendor like TI, there are
currently no GPU designers for these SoCs that have open source drivers. It is
unlikely improvemants can be made in that area that anytime soon.

The second thing they could improve for their education goals in the inclusion
of a dual core SoC to be able to teach about concurrency. That would probably
be quite a bit more expensive than the current Pi, for a feature that would
not present _that_ much more value for education.

So I'm wondering what they mean with this 'final' comment. Will they simply
stay with supporting the current Raspberry Pi models? Or will they start
developing a second Raspberry Pi? Or will they develop other computing devices
for education?

~~~
cpwright
I think that the fuller quote "the final evolution of the original Raspberry
Pi" is important. The word "original" in there doesn't lead me to believe they
are at the end of the road overall, just end of the road for this one design.

To clarify, I expect to see a more complete redesign in the not-too-distant
future. If nothing else, you want to use components that are recent so you can
keep producing more of them without increased costs for legacy components.

~~~
DCKing
> end of the road for this one design.

Yeah, that's exactly the question I got from reading it. If they are implying
the end of the road for this design, does that imply they have a next design?
If so, why would they want to redesign?

> you want to use components that are recent so you can keep producing more of
> them without increased costs for legacy components.

Good point, didn't think of that. Is this a problem even on their scale?

------
higherpurpose
Please skip ARMv7 and jump straight to ARMv8 for Raspberry Pi 2. No need to
force OS/app developers to support 3 different ISA's for years to come.

Ideally it would also be dual core and have a clock speed of at least 1.2 Ghz,
since that's what most operating systems need these days to run reasonably
well, but I guess that depends on your target price. 1 GB of (LP)DDR3(L) RAM
should also be the minimum for the next one.

~~~
pjc50
That would make the [http://www.broadcom.com/products/Applications-and-
Multimedia...](http://www.broadcom.com/products/Applications-and-Multimedia-
Processors/Tablet-Application-Processors/BCM11311) the obvious choice.

~~~
higherpurpose
That's ARMv7.

------
JamesBaxter
Prepare for a tidal wave of new Kickstarter cases

------
ChuckMcM
Looks like a nice upgrade, more USB ports. The additional I/O might be in
response to the Beaglebone Black taking share but video has consistently been
better with the Pi. I've got a number of both and they each have their uses.

I've been whacking on a USB host driver for the Cortex M4 in my not very
copius spare time and it amazes me how much the Pi manages to get done being
handicapped like that. The difference between "old" computers where the system
designer was making every effort to make I/O flow through the system as
effectively as possible, and the Pi has a system where polling for I/O is part
of the design spec. And not done well like the channel controllers of old, no
done in a very inefficient way. Amazing what ubiquity will force upon folks
:-)

------
fndrplayer13
I'd still buy a BeagleBoard Black instead. Better processor. Better GPIO
options.

------
ianwootten
For anyone who's interested - there's a podcast with Eben about the
announcement here: [http://www.raspi.today/podcast-
episode-6/](http://www.raspi.today/podcast-episode-6/)

In this he states that a second version of the pi isn't likely to happen until
2017. [http://www.raspi.today/raspberry-pi-2-expected-
in-2017/](http://www.raspi.today/raspberry-pi-2-expected-in-2017/)

------
kasperset
I like my Rasberry Pi and yes it cannot be compared with Intel Galileo. But I
am also pretty excited with this
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark)
[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-
yourself/galile...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-
yourself/galileo-maker-quark-board.html)

~~~
makomk
The Galileo has some interesting caveats, like a much slower CPU than even the
Raspberry Pi and the GPIO, PWM, etc going through an IO expander chip on the
really slow I2C bus. (Apparently there's a Rev2 with some native GPIO pins
now, presumably not compatible with the Rev1 unless you use Intel's official
abstraction layers.)

------
tjaekel
RPi B+ and I2S DACs will not work directly anymore: changed GPIOs and pinmux
different now. I did the Rasbian Kernel Patch and with four jumper wires - it
works:
[http://www.tjaekel.com/T-DAC/raspi_Bplus.html](http://www.tjaekel.com/T-DAC/raspi_Bplus.html)

Even with latest Rasbian image (June 2014) - without Kernel Patch I2S does not
work (and RPi B+ will hang). Change three bytes in a kernel module and all
fine.

------
alkonaut
A dedicated digital audio jack would be a useful addition, it could even take
the place of the useless composite video RCA, so the port arrangement of the
Model B would be kept.

With a digital audio jack a pi could be a decent hifi music streamer, better
and cheaper than the AirPort Express. Now you need a $30-50 splitter (or the
hifiberry add on) to get the audio off the hdmi, which makes the total cost
more than double.

~~~
samirmenon
For many people, the "useless" composite video RCA is what allows them to use
the Pi. It's a great way to repurpose an old TV you have laying around.

~~~
alkonaut
It should be fairly simple to have a single rca jack serve both purposes and
switch with a jumper.

It would be interesting to hear how many actually use the rca video.

------
frik
\+ micro SD card

\+ 4 USB ports

\+ more GPIO (now 40 pins)

\+ better mounting

\+ better audio controller

\+ reduced power consumption

~ combined audio and video onto the 3.5mm jack

\- power connector position moved to the side (bad for small form factor
projects)

------
rebolek
"moved composite video onto the 3.5mm jack" \- can it output both composite
video and sound at the same time?

~~~
nwh
Yes. Same as the iPod can have composite video and two audio channels. Three
ring / four section plugs.

~~~
72deluxe
TRRS connectors. Tip Ring Ring Sleeve.

------
chj
Using micro sdcard is much neater solution.

------
hexleo
I'm interested in Raspberry Pi. I bought one before. It's just a small PC, use
one hand you can hold it. But when you want to Raspberry to do some complex
works, it let you down. I want to know where does Raspberry Pi can work well?

~~~
etherealG
The Pi makes a fantastic media center when combined with XBMC.

~~~
ern
"Fantastic" may be overstating it. I've been running Raspbmc for about 15
months now, and although the video rendering is very good, the XMBC UI is a
bit laggy and unresponsive (although there seems to have been an improvement
recently). I've also used it as an SFTP client and to run a few light cron
jobs (rock solid there).

Given the price, I am pleased with it, but I wouldn't recommend it as a media
center for the non-tech savvy.

~~~
ykykkyky
Agreed. I wish that RPi has some kind of cheap prebuild of a mediaplayer. If
would be GREAT for non-techies if it just had a real power on/off switch, IR
sensor & a basic remote that just works (probably asking for too much there).

I reckon you could fix the lag of the GUI if someone implemented
Raspbmc/OpenELEC with Wayland instead of X-server. Not much has to change for
this to be possible. Only the power switch & IR sensor would have to be apart
of it. Remote could potentially be third party and WBMC would a man hours
issue.

~~~
lmedinas
It seems Wayland support for XBMC was merged last October[1]. Not sure if it
will benefit on RPI.

1 -
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ4NDE](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ4NDE)

------
soundlab
Does the new Compute Module share the same increased USB ports (with more
power available)? Have had nagging issues prototyping Pi's with cell modems
due to power consumption and was looking at the Compute for an embedded
application

~~~
fanf2
The compute module itself does not include a USB/Ethernet chip, so only has
the BCM's single USB.

------
andrewstuart
It would be good if they were more active about upgrading the hardware
performance....

------
X-Istence
Have they fixed the stability issues when it is under high load with a lot of
networking traffic? I have a RaspberryPi B and each time I start a large file
transfer the entire board locks up.

Doesn't matter what version OS I am running either!

~~~
gnyman
Have you tried another power supply? I used a "high quality" one from RS (I
think) and had odd problems with disk corruption and crashes when pushing the
limits. I switched to a old iPad charger and the crashing problems went away.

~~~
oasisbob
There is a nasty bug with overclocking and filesystem corruption that is
especially easy to hit under low-power conditions. Not sure if it's been fully
fixed. eg:

[http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=26633](http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=26633)

~~~
gnyman
Thanks I did not know, I believe I had it overclocked at the time. Very useful
to know about if it starts happening more often.

------
mrmondo
$63AUD + Shipping - No thanks! [http://au.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-
microcontroller-deve...](http://au.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-
microcontroller-development-kits/8111284/)

~~~
WatchDog
This is a little cheaper, but not $35:
[http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-
mod...](http://raspberrypiaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-model-b-plus)

~~~
mrmondo
That's still $50 though, at that price I'm just not sure its worth it -
especially since it only has a 10/100 NIC and USB 2.0 while those specs might
be an acceptable for educational purposes, at $50+ hobbyists may not find it
the most cost effective solution.

~~~
VLM
"especially since it only has a 10/100 NIC"

I'm my experience I've found it hard to push the CPU/memory/"disk" enough to
saturate the NIC, so don't worry about it.

The limiter to streaming multiple high def video streams (one at a time is OK)
or doing SDR/DSP work doesn't seem to be the NIC.

I'm having trouble thinking of a real app that wouldn't be memory/SD card/CPU
limited on my pi that would simultaneously be limited by the NIC. By real app,
I don't mean sending ping floods or running weird benchmarks, or something
that isn't an app, like transferring a file.

My main pain point with the pi hardware at this time is there's some JVM stuff
I'd like to fool around with where I'm totally patient with something that
takes an imperceptible 5 ms on the desktop taking a still imperceptible 50 ms
on the pi, but can't handle only having a half gig of ram.

------
christop
Nice that they're continuing the convention of using BBC Micro model names!

------
jedahan
Much better port layout. Glad to hear audio is improved. Not sure what
projects needed more pins but not complaining.

Wish USB/Ethernet didn't share a bus, but I never actually ran into that being
an issue yet.

~~~
duskwuff
> Not sure what projects needed more pins but not complaining.

The added pins include a couple of important ones from the SoC that were
previously not available, or were only available on a secondary connector. You
can now get JTAG over the expansion port, for instance.

------
labianchin
What about Humming Board? [http://www.solid-
run.com/products/hummingboard/](http://www.solid-
run.com/products/hummingboard/)

It has ARMv7 and has a reasonable price.

------
tdicola
Very cool, better mounting holes and microSD are nice improvements.

------
nodata
Really good technical review: [http://www.linuxvoice.com/raspberry-pi-
model-b/](http://www.linuxvoice.com/raspberry-pi-model-b/)

------
stollercyrus
I'm really glad they've added more USB ports.

------
jokoon
I wonder how well it can emulate PSX games... I guess it would not do well
because there's no 3D acceleration...

~~~
pjc50
It has extremely good 3D acceleration, provided you're not unreasonably upset
by using binary drivers. You can now get fairly good results with the open
source ones too (30fps Quake3).

------
middleclick
Is anyone running a webserver or mailserver over the Pi? Curious to know how
it holds up.

~~~
72deluxe
I am running a web server on mine using PipaOS and Lighttpd, but I rewrote my
database system to SQLite instead of MySQL. Granted, this meant I had to
reimplement some stored procedures that I had written in PHP instead (for
parent/child page traversal and navigation building) but it returns pages much
faster. I know that reading from a file all the time is likely to harm the
attached USB drive's read count, but I'm not getting many hits!

I intend to rewrite the system using C++ instead (using an old Mongoose C++
web server edition) and load the SQLite database into SQLite :memory: (without
a disk backup) instead, which means that it'll return pages much faster; it'll
only touch the "disk" database on program startup.

I see from the others that they have put PHP and MySQL and a host of other
things on theirs but for simple sites, that is probably somewhat overkill.

I also use mine as an SSH gateway.

------
GutenYe
Have them fixed the broken USB system? (USB and Ethernet share the same bus
problem)

~~~
jondot
No :(

------
ioseph
Would be nice to have an audio input jack. Pretty low on space as it is
though.

~~~
phunge
In theory you could use the I2S, but I went the easy route and hooked up a USB
DAC (Behringer UCA-202 - good cheap DAC). Thanks to Pi's USB issues, you need
to switch to USB low speed (dwc_otg.speed=1), but it's worked well.

------
Nicholas_C
Darn, I just bought one a few weeks ago, and the new one is the same price.

------
ck2
Out of curiosity have they gotten netflix to work on the Pi yet?

~~~
foldor
I'd be surprised if they did. Netflix doesn't have a Linux client, and the
only way to get it running on desktop Linux is using Wine with custom patches.
Seeing as Wine depends on the CPU being x86, this method won't work.

~~~
ClashTheBunny
Netflix works fine on my ARM Linux phone. It's not about OS or processor, it's
about middleware.

------
hayksaakian
Nice:

\- micro sd card support

\- more USB ports

\- better mounting

------
dmmalam
Looks like still no PoE?

~~~
pjc50
Minority use with expensive requirements => very unlikely to happen.

------
mellisarob
I'm still quite unclear about this

------
copperx
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 now? The robotics, home automation, and weekend project use cases
seem like would be better served by a $5 microcontroller.

Some projects, such as the weather station, justify the use of a full-fledged
OS, but with the cost of buying an existing, proven, weather station being so
low ... why bother?

And for a cheap webserver? A $1/month VPS is more powerful than this thing.

Can anyone tell me what is the use case of this?

~~~
weland
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
> 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.

~~~
girvo
This is something I'm very interested in, and nearly bought a Pi today; I want
a board that I can learn ARM assembly and C on to build a toy OS. I built half
of a tiny kernel on X86 (woo real-mode!) nearly a decade ago, so I know a tiny
bit about it all, but I'd assumed the Pi was a great target: well priced,
tonnes of them out there so hopefully well documented, etc.

What would you suggest instead? I'm considering just firing up QEMU and it's
ARM baseboard target then dealing with porting to real hardware later, but
there's something exciting about seeing a real circuit firing up your kernel
that makes me smile.

~~~
weland
Basically what userbinator said.

I had to deal with them before, so if you can, stay away from cheap Chinese
boards or hackable routers. When you're just learning, it's not worth it, the
dollars you save will be more than made up in working around subtle bugs and
trying to figure out what the poorly-worded, incomplete documentation is
trying to convey.

I also warmly suggest not to bother with anything that says Atheros or
Broadcom on the case. Their documentation is hopelessly tucked away behind a
gazillion NDAs you have to sign, and working based on leaked material isn't
fun. As for their SDKs, if you _could_ get me started (but you can't because I
signed that gazillion bazillion NDAs and I don't wanna go to jail), I could
talk for days.

Sadly, I haven't worked with it either, but the Beaglebone Black looks like a
good option and there's an actual community around it.

~~~
xavierxf
Do you, by any chance, know of a resource that documents the process of
actually getting your toy OS (which I assume was cross-compiled) to run on
another board such as the BBB or the RPi?

~~~
weland
Sorry for the late reply, I just saw your message. I don't have a toy OS (not
enough spare time), _but_ I did work on one as part of my job.

I don't know of any documents, but the way you'd generally want to do it is
wrap hardware- and board-specific parts of your code in a hardware-agnostic
interface which is what you use to write higher-level code in the system. That
way, getting the OS to run on another CPU or board is all about writing the
relevant callbacks. You can get the general idea from Linux's mach-* and
plat-* files. This isn't really OS-specific; I'm pointing at Linux because it
will probably be easiest to get documentation about it, though my personal
preference is elsewhere.

------
VLM
One funny social dynamic to watch with the pi is you give people a little
computer with specs that would be pretty good five or so years ago and you get
some responses like:

"Humanity didn't use computers five years ago at all, for any purpose, being
capable of doing anything that was done five years ago is inherently totally
useless today and any thought of it should be abolished because I say so la la
la I'm not listening to your real world examples la la la and that's somehow
your problem not mine la la la". If you ram it past their self censorship to
prove there exists a real world application for a five year old computer they
get really angry. Its kind of funny to watch.

Maybe its astroturfing from people selling more powerful computers.

