Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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Makes a great backup server

d_brennen said:
Anyone doing anything cool with theirs yet, bar media playing?
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Got one hidden in the loft attached to an external drive and a powerline adapter; great cheap way of backing up my files with an overnight cron job & rsync. Currently benchmarking the new Raspbian distro to see if it can be quick enough over the network to be a more fully featured NAS/media server :)
 
I was going to use mine for media server but seems a mission to do so as most of my rips are not vob files :( so its sitting and doing nowt atm.

Cant think of anything else to use it for.
 
Most of the farnell time is shipping. Ordered mine last Tuesday, it shipped Wednesday and dropped through the door on Saturday.
 
How hard would it be to cancel my RS order? I know there is a form, but I am worried they will just ignore it and it will mess up my order.

I would love to jump ship to Farnell if I could.
 
Rich43 said:
How hard would it be to cancel my RS order? I know there is a form, but I am worried they will just ignore it and it will mess up my order.

I would love to jump ship to Farnell if I could.
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I canceled my RS order after having second thoughts about how powerful a media client it would be. The email I received after wards reads:

*****
We are sorry you have decided to cancel your Raspberry Pi order with RS Components & Allied Electronics.
We confirm your cancellation is now underway and refunds will be processed within 14 working days.
Customer Details
First Name: Bilbo
Surname: Baggins
E-Mail: [email protected]
Telephone: 123456789

Online order reference no: 00100101110100
*****
Seems a pretty decent email to me, they should honour the cancel.
 
RC4 is out. http://www.raspbmc.com/. I've not tried it yet, but this sounds like a potential fix to the 1080p / DTS issues (I hope).

Hard floating point & Raspbian

Previously, Raspbmc relied software emulated floating point calculations. Now by using native hardware to perform this action, we see an incredible increase in performance. Navigating the UI is more fluid than ever, and, as before, playback performance is unrivaled and flawless. This is probably the most significant yet understated feature in this release. It brings the best performance increase of any bug fix or feature introduction yet. I would like to thank s7mx1 for working on getting XBMC to play nice with the toolchain, and Dom @ Raspberry Pi for giving us a workable toolchain.

Raspbmc is now based on Raspbian, which is in turn a derivative of Debian Wheezy. Raspbian has been optimised to run on the Pi as it uses hardware based floating point.
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How fast should I expect transfer speeds to a samba share on my raspberry pi be? It seems to start at 8MB/s when copying an album over, but slowly drops to 600KB/s? Seems very slow to me. :(

Running raspbian. :)
 
If you're running from SD card and copying to the SD card, then I wouldn't expect it to be very quick.
If you were running from SD card and copying to an external source (i.e. USB stick or HD), then I'd expect it to be a lot better.
 
Okay, external storage is the way to go then. I have an external 120GB USB hard drive but the pi can't seem to give it enough power to work. Time for a powered USB hub?
 
Harvey616 said:
Okay, external storage is the way to go then. I have an external 120GB USB hard drive but the pi can't seem to give it enough power to work. Time for a powered USB hub?
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The USB ports on the RPi only supply about 130mA (well below USB spec), so you would either need a self powered external HDD or a powered hub that can provide enough current for a HDD.
 
PiKe said:
Farnell are like less than a week.
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rpstewart said:
Most of the farnell time is shipping. Ordered mine last Tuesday, it shipped Wednesday and dropped through the door on Saturday.
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Can anyone else confirm that Farnell are currently this fast? Their website claims 3 weeks (and 5 weeks after pressing the 'Order' button), which is around the ETA for my RS order to be sent out. I'd also be tempted to jump ship if Farnell are really that much faster. The funny thing is, I thought I'd registered interest with Farnell ages ago and just never heard anything back about it, so I assumed they were even further behind than RS.

I have a few other things I want to order from Farnell, but I object to paying expensive postage for a handful of cheap components, so if the Pi can be sent out soon then I could lump it all in one order and that would solve the problem.

:edit:

Or maybe I can't put the Pi into an order with other components. Nevermind, I'd still be interested in knowing whether their dispatch times are consistently as fast as the posts above, or whether they were unusually fast.

:edit2:

I'm impatient, so I ordered anyway. I'll wait and see which is dispatched first, then I'll cancel the other. I liked the case that RS were offering, it was simple and cheap, but ordering caseless from Farnell lets me have some DIY fun with it.
 
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Harvey616 said:
Okay, external storage is the way to go then. I have an external 120GB USB hard drive but the pi can't seem to give it enough power to work. Time for a powered USB hub?
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I've just tested some network copying speeds on my RPi, that is after fixing the half broken networking on my self-built Raspbian image.
Copying a ~300MB file from Samba share to SD Card or external USB stick gave a constant transfer of 2.0-2.2MBps.

Are the files I tried to copy representative of your tests (size-wise)?
 
sjt269 said:
Can anyone else confirm that Farnell are currently this fast? Their website claims 3 weeks (and 5 weeks after pressing the 'Order' button), which is around the ETA for my RS order to be sent out. I'd also be tempted to jump ship if Farnell are really that much faster. The funny thing is, I thought I'd registered interest with Farnell ages ago and just never heard anything back about it, so I assumed they were even further behind than RS.

I have a few other things I want to order from Farnell, but I object to paying expensive postage for a handful of cheap components, so if the Pi can be sent out soon then I could lump it all in one order and that would solve the problem.

:edit:

Or maybe I can't put the Pi into an order with other components. Nevermind, I'd still be interested in knowing whether their dispatch times are consistently as fast as the posts above, or whether they were unusually fast.

:edit2:

I'm impatient, so I ordered anyway. I'll wait and see which is dispatched first, then I'll cancel the other. I liked the case that RS were offering, it was simple and cheap, but ordering caseless from Farnell lets me have some DIY fun with it.
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My Pi came within a week from ordering with Farnell
 
Then I'll hope for the same. I have a bunch of (fairly standard) plans for it, so I'm quite looking forward to having one to play with.

Can it power wireless mice and keyboards, or am I better off sticking with wired ones?
 
sjt269 said:
Then I'll hope for the same. I have a bunch of (fairly standard) plans for it, so I'm quite looking forward to having one to play with.

Can it power wireless mice and keyboards, or am I better off sticking with wired ones?
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can use wireless fine i have a Logitech mk320 set
 
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