Tried 'openelec' today, ordered it with that Pi, the Raspberry cannot possibly play HD in the Debian soft, just slow motion, not even normal resolution AVI Divx, but when I put in the openelec SDcard, I could play 'astronaut farmer' HD H264 that I recorded from satellite no problem, my Divx AVIs too, and it can zoom full screen unlike my 1000 Euro Samsung TV. Seems to have a good demuxer too, supports ceefax / teletext??? have not tried that one yet. So now I need one more Raspberry for media player, one more for flight controller, one more for transmitter controller, mmm seems we have a winner here :-)
On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Mar 2013 10:23:01 GMT) it happened snipped-for-privacy@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote in :
Oh YES that feels GOOD!
As to PIC, remeber this Pi board eats about 700 mA (IIRC), while PIC is 3 orders of magnitude lower in current eating. So each has its place. Here the selecton has been made what to have onboard. I will have to do some precise current measurements for battery life on the Raspberry Pi. It has its advantages, plug in any USB camera plus Wifi dongle in one, and wifi dongle and small PAL monitor in the other, and you have your video link. We become box designers, first it was transistors, then chips, and now boards... Some knowledge should never be lost however.
You have gone straight from one of the most underpowered microcontrollers still out there to a microprocessor that approaches full-blown PC performance.
But there is a large range of microcontrollers in between, for example checkout STM32F3 or LPC4350. Or for more PIC-like simplicity and determinism the cortex M0 parts might suit you better, e.g. LPC800 in so-20 package.
All modern parts designed for efficient C programming.
Have that working now, some old Sweex (and they sell rejects???) WiFi dongle and a Logitech USB E2500 webcam...
The problem here was a re-occuring error message: wlan0: deauthenticating from by local choice (reason=3)
No idea, but after manually reconfiguring wlan0, and then restarting all wpa_supplicant related stuff, its been running now for more than an hour with WiFi video link:-) Will need to script it. root@raspberrypi:~# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1825 errors:0 dropped:2 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1770 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:123736 (120.8 KiB) TX bytes:419848 (410.0 KiB)
Sure, i have a PicKit2 and can easily program and use several of the smaller dip devices. Plus it will help me get more experience doing small stuff. ?;-)
If i didn't think that shipping would be more than the parts were worth i would be glad to have a dozen or so assorted PICs to learn with.
I don't doubt you for so much as a heartbeat. The real question for using any uC or uP is what do you want it to do, once that is defined selection is then driven by familiarity / 'ease of use' and total implemented cost in both labor and parts (and the value of these varies wildly, for hobbyists cash price may completely dominate, and for modest volume products engineering labor costs may completely dominate).
True enough... and if you are already familiar with PIC say, and it does what you want, and all you think you will ever need, stick with it.
But if you can "become familiar" with something like the ARM cortex-M3 and associated tools (gcc, openocd, gdb say)... not a trivial task... Then you can apply your strategy to a much wider range of problems going forward. And you can choose between any of a couple of dozen manufacturers if they have a part that fits particularly well, without learning everything again.
The now back in stock device from Sparkfun for one.
Beaglebone as another. You really should at least have hardware multiply if not full NEON. If you troll the forums, you will find lots of people complaining the RPi is underpowered.
I find the A8 at 800MHz to be about 30% the CPU power of P8700 @ 2.53GHz (the cpu on my notebook). Basically you can actually do stuff with the A8. There are some cheap A9 boards out there, but I don't know if they have full linux support. The Panda does, but it is substantially more than the RPi.
Until Silverlight is completely dead, I'm not sure any linux box is good for a media server. You would have to run moonlight and buy a codec. I built my HTPC on windows, simply to be able to run everything there is to run. Of course a copy of win cost nearly as much as the Atom SBC.
The A8 and A9 can do a lot. You find them in tablets and high end cameras. From my experience, the average geek gets tired of the Rpi quickly because it can't do much.
Ubuntu with icewm is tolerable. Not snappy like tablet, which are highly customized, but I've used it with firefox as a desktop for yucks. I've been using Arm for other stuff, but I wanted to see what it was like to use one as a general purpose computer.
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