25/07/2014
树莓派 Raspberry Pi B+ Arrived
I got my brand new Raspberry Pi Version B+ delivered today. I got one RPi Version B last year but I left it in China just for Bitcoin mining controller.
The Element14 is the official reseller for Raspberry Pi in Australia and it’s cheaper than the last one I got from eBay. The protection case has not been arrived so I just got the main circuit board today, never mind.
The B+ version costs me $38 in AUD excl. GST (so approximately $41 AUD in total), it’s free shipping so it’s not that bad anyway.
There were few changes made with this latest version of Raspberry Pi, including two more USB ports, additional IO ports for better extension, and a micro-SD card slot. Unfortunately, the CPU and RAM specs were remained unchanged so there were no improvements for the performance.
One of the most important reason I bought this new Raspberry Pi is to have an insight into the XBMC, one of the most poplar open-source media centre in the universe. It was said that some people used it for Hulu and Netflix streaming. I tried but it came into a conclusion that this solution is no longer available as Hulu.com changed its encryption methods (Poor XBMC). As a result, I changed it back to Raspbian, a popular Linux distribution based on Debian.
I am now using a Counterfeit Micro SD card from TinyDeal (link). The writing speed was sooooo slow. I am considering swap it later.
06/02/2015
Raspberry Pi 2 Has Arrived
By dch1 in Just Notes No Comments Tags: Raspberry Pi
I Received my Raspberry Pi 2 today from element14. From my first impression of this latest version, everything seems to work much better than before. I am writing this Blog just on the latest version of Raspbian, which is still a bit buggy. In fact, the previous generation – Raspberry Pi B and B+ was quite unusable under business environment, mainly due to the low spec of the CPU.
This version of the Raspberry Pi comes with the Broadcom BCM2836 SoC chip with 1GB DDR2 RAM. It has 4 logic processors with 900Mhz each. It is said that the performance has been boosted for up to 6 times than before and I could definitely feel the difference of the performance. What’s more, it will be the first 3rd-party IoT (Internet of Things) Windows 10 device, becoming THE CHEAPEST Windows 10 PC on this planet ($38 in AUD Excl GST).
I installed an Arduino software on this new board and the compiling time is so quick. As a result, it should be a productive environment for Arduino developments.