Just a quick note on something I found out about the RPi 2:
Seems it can be really sensitive about the quality of its power supply.
Just bought my RPi 2 a few weeks ago with a new 2A power supply, and had been having quite a few crashes while running BOINC tasks. Tried everything - resetting projects, removing the wisdomf file, reinstalling BOINC, different BOINC versions, different levels of optimisation at compilation of BOINC, reinstalling Raspbian (both Jessie and Wheezy), better cooling - nothing helped. Kernel crashes every few hours while running BOINC, requiring a hard reset, and the odd error while computing being reported back to E@H after a crash.
Switched out the new 2A power supply for the old 2A Samsung phone charger that's been running my RPi B. The RPi 2 is now running solid as a rock.
And the RPi B, now running on the new 2A power supply, is also running solid as a rock. This, despite the RPi B also driving a USB HDD solely via USB power, while the RPi 2's USB HDD is powered externally.
I've read around the intarwebz that the RPi 2 is more fussy about its power supply than the RPi B despite only needing a bit more power. Seems to be true, especially when running 4 cores of E@H at 1GHz with fftw wisdom.
Edit: also, that liquid cooled cluster is awesome.
It does appear true that a Pi2 is more sensitive to supplied power. I recently purchased a Pi2 with the recommended Pi power supply and it has been flawless. More recently, because I am using it in a robotic undertaking, I switched to a "Power Bank" that I purchased through Adafruit.com. It is rated as: 4400mAh - 5V @ 1A. I have been able to power the Pi2 on this powerbank driving a wireless NIC, a Logitech USB camera as well as streaming video and operating a robotic crawler. I would say that I have over the course of 3 days gotten about 6 hours out of the power bank. Not bad considering all that it is doing. If interested you can see the video here. Scroll to the very bottom.
a) If you had tried to run the BRP4 Einstein@Home search under Ubuntu Mate on a Raspi2 or similar board, you will have encountered computing failures because of some libc issue. There's a new BRP4 beta version out now that should fix this, see http://einsteinathome.org/node/198096&nowrap=true#142900
b) I guess many of you will have read by now that the OUYA mini Android game console (running on a quad-core Tegra ARM SoC by NVIDIA) is set to die :-(. OUYA was one of the most spectacular Kickstarter projects, the original intention was to create a low cost gaming console for Android games with a rather open and 'fair' software eco-system, e.g. all games were required to have at least a free trial mode of some levels so you could try-before-buy. It would have been great for users and self-publishing independent game makers....in theory.
Maybe the hype was just too big and expectations soon were higher than what OUYA could initially deliver. So it never was a commercial success, not for the game developers and not for OUYA Inc. itself. Soon they gave up on the mandatory 'try-before-buy' policy and allowed games on the store that required a payment to install them.
Even with this concession to commercial success, OUYA never really took off, and finally, OUYA Inc decided to sell the most valuable parts of the OUYA ecosystem, the software division including the store (with user accounts), to Razer. Razer has a micro console of their own and are interested in getting OUYA users and content developers on their console. They are obviously not interested in the OUYA hardware, so they didn't buy that part of OUYA Inc, which means the OUYA hardware is now a discontinued product. No OUYA 2, no updates, at some time no store anymore I would guess ... I'm not even sure the thing will still work properly once the OUYA store is relaunched under Razer, reportedly in about a year.
With all this in mind, the remaining OUYAs should now be sold at (say) half the original price, but I haven't seen this yet in Germany. Some people have experimented with Linux on the thing, at perhaps 40..50$ it would be a good buy if you could get Linux on it in a user-friendly way.
Kind of sad if you ask me. The idea was great. The product itself isn't all that bad unless you expect a Playstation-like user experience and content.
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little dev board, and it’s one of the best tech bargains around. But there’s a new alternative: one that costs less than half as much but still packs a ton of computing power.
For just $15, you can get your hands on the Orange Pi PC (presumably the creators spent a lot more time working on keeping the price down than they did on coming up with an original name). How much computer can you get for less than a Hamilton? More than you’d think.
Quote:
The New Raspberry Pi runs a quad-core Broadcomm processor clocked at 900MHz. The Orange Pi PC, on the other hand, runs an Allwinner H3 processor with four cores clocked at 1.6GHz and an ARM Mali-400 GPU. It’s a very capable processing tandem: it allows the Orange Pi PC to handle 4K video playback, something even the new Raspberry Pi isn’t capable of.
Raspbian has now moved to a Debian Jessie foundation, and the BOINC in the Jessie repo at least can report the NEON feature properly (useful for Raspberry Pi 2s).
Cheers
HB
Interesting. When I saw the image I thought perfect size for robotics but after further reading realized it is limited by USB ports, networking, etc. Yes you can fix this by adding a powered USB hub (wifi and bluetooth dongle), but now you need to provide power to the hub, Pi, drive motors in a mobile configuration. All doable but after you factor in the costs you are better off buying a Pi2.
I am sure the goal of the Pi ZERO is to offer greater "computer accesability" and not to support robotic applications and on this point they have probably achieved their goal.
Yes you can fix this by adding a powered USB hub (wifi and bluetooth dongle), but now you need to provide power to the hub, Pi, drive motors in a mobile configuration.
I think a WiFi dongle should be ok powered from the Pi Zero itself w/o a powered hub, all you need is an adapter from MicroUSB to "normal" USB.
Getting many invalids with 2
)
Getting many invalids with 2 different Raspberry Pi.
http://einsteinathome.org/account/tasks&offset=0&show_names=1&state=4&appid=0
Anyone else seeing this?
Just a quick note on
)
Just a quick note on something I found out about the RPi 2:
Seems it can be really sensitive about the quality of its power supply.
Just bought my RPi 2 a few weeks ago with a new 2A power supply, and had been having quite a few crashes while running BOINC tasks. Tried everything - resetting projects, removing the wisdomf file, reinstalling BOINC, different BOINC versions, different levels of optimisation at compilation of BOINC, reinstalling Raspbian (both Jessie and Wheezy), better cooling - nothing helped. Kernel crashes every few hours while running BOINC, requiring a hard reset, and the odd error while computing being reported back to E@H after a crash.
Switched out the new 2A power supply for the old 2A Samsung phone charger that's been running my RPi B. The RPi 2 is now running solid as a rock.
And the RPi B, now running on the new 2A power supply, is also running solid as a rock. This, despite the RPi B also driving a USB HDD solely via USB power, while the RPi 2's USB HDD is powered externally.
I've read around the intarwebz that the RPi 2 is more fussy about its power supply than the RPi B despite only needing a bit more power. Seems to be true, especially when running 4 cores of E@H at 1GHz with fftw wisdom.
Edit: also, that liquid cooled cluster is awesome.
It does appear true that a
)
It does appear true that a Pi2 is more sensitive to supplied power. I recently purchased a Pi2 with the recommended Pi power supply and it has been flawless. More recently, because I am using it in a robotic undertaking, I switched to a "Power Bank" that I purchased through Adafruit.com. It is rated as: 4400mAh - 5V @ 1A. I have been able to power the Pi2 on this powerbank driving a wireless NIC, a Logitech USB camera as well as streaming video and operating a robotic crawler. I would say that I have over the course of 3 days gotten about 6 hours out of the power bank. Not bad considering all that it is doing. If interested you can see the video here. Scroll to the very bottom.
Some news for the ARM fans
)
Some news for the ARM fans among us:
a) If you had tried to run the BRP4 Einstein@Home search under Ubuntu Mate on a Raspi2 or similar board, you will have encountered computing failures because of some libc issue. There's a new BRP4 beta version out now that should fix this, see http://einsteinathome.org/node/198096&nowrap=true#142900
b) I guess many of you will have read by now that the OUYA mini Android game console (running on a quad-core Tegra ARM SoC by NVIDIA) is set to die :-(. OUYA was one of the most spectacular Kickstarter projects, the original intention was to create a low cost gaming console for Android games with a rather open and 'fair' software eco-system, e.g. all games were required to have at least a free trial mode of some levels so you could try-before-buy. It would have been great for users and self-publishing independent game makers....in theory.
Maybe the hype was just too big and expectations soon were higher than what OUYA could initially deliver. So it never was a commercial success, not for the game developers and not for OUYA Inc. itself. Soon they gave up on the mandatory 'try-before-buy' policy and allowed games on the store that required a payment to install them.
Even with this concession to commercial success, OUYA never really took off, and finally, OUYA Inc decided to sell the most valuable parts of the OUYA ecosystem, the software division including the store (with user accounts), to Razer. Razer has a micro console of their own and are interested in getting OUYA users and content developers on their console. They are obviously not interested in the OUYA hardware, so they didn't buy that part of OUYA Inc, which means the OUYA hardware is now a discontinued product. No OUYA 2, no updates, at some time no store anymore I would guess ... I'm not even sure the thing will still work properly once the OUYA store is relaunched under Razer, reportedly in about a year.
With all this in mind, the remaining OUYAs should now be sold at (say) half the original price, but I haven't seen this yet in Germany. Some people have experimented with Linux on the thing, at perhaps 40..50$ it would be a good buy if you could get Linux on it in a user-friendly way.
Kind of sad if you ask me. The idea was great. The product itself isn't all that bad unless you expect a Playstation-like user experience and content.
R.I.P. OUYA
RE: The Raspberry Pi is an
)
http://www.geek.com/chips/15-pc-makes-the-raspberry-pi-look-expensive-1632604/
For those wanting a more up
)
For those wanting a more up to date BOINC client and prepared to use the testing version, Debian Stretch for the Raspberry Pi's has BOINC 7.6.12.
If you're running a Parallella then LocutusOfBorg's ppa also has 7.6.12 for Ubuntu.
The 7.6 builds of BOINC report the CPU capabilities properly as well as various other changes and fixes since the repo builds.
BOINC blog
Raspbian has now moved to a
)
Raspbian has now moved to a Debian Jessie foundation, and the BOINC in the Jessie repo at least can report the NEON feature properly (useful for Raspberry Pi 2s).
Cheers
HB
There is now a 5 $ version of
)
There is now a 5 $ version of the Raspberry Pi called "Raspberry Pi Zero".
It's ideal for projects that require a small form factor.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/
Cheers
HB
Interesting. When I saw the
)
Interesting. When I saw the image I thought perfect size for robotics but after further reading realized it is limited by USB ports, networking, etc. Yes you can fix this by adding a powered USB hub (wifi and bluetooth dongle), but now you need to provide power to the hub, Pi, drive motors in a mobile configuration. All doable but after you factor in the costs you are better off buying a Pi2.
I am sure the goal of the Pi ZERO is to offer greater "computer accesability" and not to support robotic applications and on this point they have probably achieved their goal.
RE: Yes you can fix this
)
I think a WiFi dongle should be ok powered from the Pi Zero itself w/o a powered hub, all you need is an adapter from MicroUSB to "normal" USB.