Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Released Today

[nidlaX]

Official Announcement

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Specs:
-900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance of Pi1)
-1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory of Pi1)
-Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1
-Same form factor as Pi1 B+

This one is looking good with backward compatibility with Pi1 accessories and forward compatibility with Windows 10.

[Monkeh]

Same crappy design, faster CPU.

[coppice]

It might not be the greatest design, but they fixed by far its biggest drawback - an instruction set that was out of line with the rest of the industry. Now they have an ARMv7 instruction set core they can run the same software practically every other ARM board runs.

[Monkeh]

It might not be the greatest design, but they fixed by far its biggest drawback - an instruction set that was out of line with the rest of the industry. Now they have an ARMv7 instruction set core they can run the same software practically every other ARM board runs.

If only they'd provide a real NIC to use, it might not be such a total pile of crap.

[Monkeh]

It's a £25 SBC with excellent community support. What do you need a "good" NIC for, trying to build a USB NAS? 

No, just something which doesn't munch CPU just to send a few packets down a wire.

It's a crap design. A bit more CPU doesn't fix it. There are, quite simply, better options. But the Raspi got the early media hype, so it gets all the attention.

[coppice]

If only they'd provide a real NIC to use, it might not be such a total pile of crap.

THE NIC isn't the real problem. Its the buggy USB controller. If they have fixed that, which I hope would be the case in a new chip, the NIC might seem perfectly reasonable. That nasty USB controller slows everything down.

[andersm]

It fixes the most important issues with the original version, just in time for people to start asking for a 64-bit CPU.

[DaGlitch]

Will be interesting to see how this stacks up with the Odroid C1.

[ttt]

Same crappy design, faster CPU.

Anyone knows where to get a proper datasheet for the Broadcom BCM2836?

Amlogic got wise and released a datasheet of their S805 (in anticipation of the Pi2?): http://dn.odroid.com/S805/Datasheet/S805_Datasheet%20V0.8%2020150126.pdf

What grinds my wheel is that these designs (Pi2 and Odroid C1) still only have very limited applications outside of simple media stuff given you need to drive GPIOs from Linux (RT or not, same issue). To do something more 'advanced' IO wise you'll need an external FPGA/MCU and limit yourself to an extremely slow data path coming out of the main board.

No competition for BeagleBone (Black) and Intel Edison v2 at this time. Yes, I realize they cost much more.

[Monkeh]

Same crappy design, faster CPU.

Anyone knows where to get a proper datasheet for the Broadcom BCM2836?

In Broadcom's locked vault, under armed guard by lawyers with stacks of NDA paperwork as their weapons.

[Stonent]

I'd like to see something like these with a built in LVDS or TMDS LCD interface.  Would be a perfect interface to an LCD panel without a converter from HDMI to LVDS.

[rolycat]

It's a £25 SBC with excellent community support. What do you need a "good" NIC for, trying to build a USB NAS? 

No, just something which doesn't munch CPU just to send a few packets down a wire.

It's a crap design. A bit more CPU doesn't fix it. There are, quite simply, better options. But the Raspi got the early media hype, so it gets all the attention.

Your prejudice is showing. "A bit more CPU" ?!? It has around six times the performance, and with a quad-core processor it can afford to "munch" a few cycles in exchange for saving the cost of a full-bore Ethernet controller. If you need high-performance Ethernet spend more money and buy a different board.

The new Pi 2 offers a lot more processor power than the Beaglebone Black, twice the memory, a more powerful video processor and far more community support for beginners. And it's ten bucks cheaper. What are these "better options"?

It may not be the right choice for experienced electronics engineers, but it's a great choice for its target market - children and adults who want to get hands-on with computers and learn something about how they actually work.

[Monkeh]

It's a £25 SBC with excellent community support. What do you need a "good" NIC for, trying to build a USB NAS? 

No, just something which doesn't munch CPU just to send a few packets down a wire.

It's a crap design. A bit more CPU doesn't fix it. There are, quite simply, better options. But the Raspi got the early media hype, so it gets all the attention.

Your prejudice is showing. "A bit more CPU" ?!? It has around six times the performance, and with a quad-core processor it can afford to "munch" a few cycles in exchange for saving the cost of a full-bore Ethernet controller. If you need high-performance Ethernet spend more money and buy a different board.

The new Pi 2 offers a lot more processor power than the Beaglebone Black, twice the memory, a more powerful video processor and far more community support for beginners. And it's ten bucks cheaper. What are these "better options"?

It may not be the right choice for experienced electronics engineers, but it's a great choice for its target market - children and adults who want to get hands-on with computers and learn something about how they actually work.

An oDroid C1 is $35 shipped (that is, cheaper in the UK), faster, has real Ethernet (sure, it's a Realtek PHY, but at least it's not USB), and a CPU with freely available documentation. It offers an OTG port, RTC, and even an onboard ADC.

Yes, the Raspi is good for children and child-like (relatively speaking) adults. It is not, however, a good piece of hardware, and bolting on a few extra cores Broadcom found on a dusty shelf is not as big a step forward as they could have taken.

[LukeW]

But what does Raspberry Pi actually offer in terms of "hands-on with computers and learn something about how they actually work"?

If you want to learn about getting started with C or Python or something and writing some programs, you can do that with any existing PC that most people already have.

Hell, if you want to learn about programming and computers, wait until you find a PC that somebody is throwing away in the kerbside rubbish, try and find one that looks intact and working, bring it home, get it running, reformat the disk, install Linux on it, and get started programming.

Cost = 0, and it's more educational, with knowledge more relevant to PC hardware that is widely used in the real world.

If you want to "really learn how a computer works" at a deep, fundamental level you might be best to go and get a Z80 or something and wire it up to some switches and LEDs. And of course you can get extensive books on the subject of that CPU, the instruction set, the datasheet etc, all the knowledge is open to you about the fundamentals of the chip.

I really don't think a closed box of proprietary, undocumented Broadcom IP actually offers you anything there. It's still a "black box" model of computing, it's just that the black box is shrunk down to the size of a single IC. Just because the Raspberry Pi is a bare PCB, and you can see the voltage regulator and you can see the USB interface and what not around the main IC, I don't see how that in and of itself teaches you "something about how computers actually work"

[rolycat]

This has been debated before on this forum, and the answer is that resurrecting ancient PCs and wiring up crusty old Z80s or other obsolete microprocessors may well be a good way for individual hobbyists and enthusiasts to learn programming and/or electronics on a budget. It's totally impractical for children in a classroom environment.

The Raspberry Pi was designed from the outset as a tool for education, and its rampant popularity with 'makers' and hobbyists was an unexpected bonus for the charity which created and continues to develop it.

[bbjk7]

Bought the ODroid C1 and it just arrived yesterday, still need to get the right power and display connectors.

When I saw the headlines I was a bit worried, but despite all the hype, I'm still happy with my ODroid purchase and would buy it again... Even with this new RasPi released for $35USD 

OdroidC1      v  RaspPi2B
1.5Ghz x4        700Mhz x4
GBit Ethernet   100Mbit Ethernet
1gb Ram          1gb Ram
$35USD           $35USD
Infrared           No
eemc               No

[helius]

Electronics vendor calls itself a "charity" --- red flag.

[rolycat]

This appears to be an unbiased and informative comparison between the Odroid C1 and the Raspberry Pi 2.

As is so often the case, which is 'better' depends on the requirements of the user.

[bbjk7]

Thanks rolycat, couldn't agree with you more

[chickenHeadKnob]

Bought the ODroid C1 and it just arrived yesterday, still need to get the right power and display connectors.

When I saw the headlines I was a bit worried, but despite all the hype, I'm still happy with my ODroid purchase and would buy it again... Even with this new RasPi released for $35USD 

OdroidC1      v  RaspPi2B
1.5Ghz x4        700Mhz x4
GBit Ethernet   100Mbit Ethernet
1gb Ram          1gb Ram
$35USD           $35USD
Infrared           No
eemc               No

I, like Ivan just bought (a few weeks ago) the now obsolete B+ . So ya'all can thank us for triggering the release of the Pi2. I only wanted to find out how Mathematica 10 runs. It turns out dog ...slow... practically unusable. So now looking for an upgrade. Just to correct your table quoted above Pi2 is 900Mhz I believe. Also the difference in A7 to A5 in Dmips should result in only a 10 to 15 % advantage for the odroid once clock rate is figured  in.

edit: I should add that if you are interested in interfacing homebuilt hardware, and what eevbee isn't, then the small incompatibility of the odroid's analog inputs maybe an irritation. It is for me, if I want an ADC I would go with an external spi based one anyway.

[linux-works]

lol, just 31 days ago, I bought a b+ from amazon.  when I saw the new annoucement, I wanted to see if I could still return my b+ to amazon.  nope.  one day too late.  just my luck...

and yeah, the usb elephant-in-the-room bug is still basically there.  it can't be truly fixed.  sucks that they didn't think this all the way thru and keep releasing the same basic hobbled network system over and over again.

on the good side, its a great platform for playing with i2c and spi.  can't easily do that with x86 style pc's.

[rob77]

i don't know guys why are you bitching so much about the RPi ethernet..... ok it uses more cpu, so what ? it was never intended to be a network gear ! for me and apparently many others (see how much of RPi boards were sold) the ethernet is working just fine if you need a board with high performance ethernet then change your budget limit one order of magnitude higher and there's a lot of options in that budget limit (and don't even try to comment like "Odroid got a 1Gbps ethernet" ... that absolutely doesn't mean it's high performance).

[firewalker]

Windows 10 will officially support the Rpi2.

Alexander.

[rolycat]

Electronics vendor calls itself a "charity" --- red flag.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity - what precisely are you trying to insinuate?

[Kjelt]

I want to build a small device controlling my av gear over IP control so I had the choice between:

Arm32 like the STM32F207 with LWIP , design own board or buy something from embedded artists than spent probably 4 weeks getting LWIP and RTOS to do what I want and at least two days to get gcc up and running stable with nice ide

Rasp pi2 with Rasbian and it has python/gcc included up and running within 1 hour.

For the first time I choose the latter since my spare time is scarse at the moment, I have learned enough over ARM processors and c programming on work but for my hobby it makes less sense.
Yesterday I bought the pi2 (never ever worked with it) and at evening within 1 hour reading, downloading and installing the image was up and running and I could run some python scripts. I now need to learn Python first  but I could use the gcc also.

I think this is a great way for people not having access to good Arm C compilers and the est. 160+ hours needed to master it not forgetting the RTOS, LWIP and all other stuff to get things going. I do not mean the people just copying all readyset images for xmbc and mediaplayer stuff but the youngsters that are using the GPIO and starting to doing and running things, learning electronics and jeeez I am 48 but watched a youtube video yesterday where a 13 yo kid told me how to use python to send UDP packets     It is so easy kids can do it , try that with a bare Arm processor good luck teacher 

[Monkeh]

i don't know guys why are you bitching so much about the RPi ethernet..... ok it uses more cpu, so what ? it was never intended to be a network gear ! for me and apparently many others (see how much of RPi boards were sold) the ethernet is working just fine if you need a board with high performance ethernet then change your budget limit one order of magnitude higher and there's a lot of options in that budget limit (and don't even try to comment like "Odroid got a 1Gbps ethernet" ... that absolutely doesn't mean it's high performance).

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

[Rigby]

If only they'd provide a real NIC to use, it might not be such a total pile of crap.

THE NIC isn't the real problem. Its the buggy USB controller. If they have fixed that, which I hope would be the case in a new chip, the NIC might seem perfectly reasonable. That nasty USB controller slows everything down.

Buuuut 100Mbit Ethernet on a 480Mbit bus...  What's the problem, exactly?

[Monkeh]

If only they'd provide a real NIC to use, it might not be such a total pile of crap.

THE NIC isn't the real problem. Its the buggy USB controller. If they have fixed that, which I hope would be the case in a new chip, the NIC might seem perfectly reasonable. That nasty USB controller slows everything down.

Buuuut 100Mbit Ethernet on a 480Mbit bus...  What's the problem, exactly?

100Mbit full duplex on a 480Mbit half duplex, CPU-driven bus, just to get started.

[Stonent]

Darn and I just bought a B model 2 year ago! 

[rolycat]

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

The Raspberry Pi was released three years ago, long before 'young pretenders' such as the Odroid. At the time there was no cost effective alternative to the integrated USB hub and Ethernet controller.

With the Pi 2 the developers made a deliberate decision that preserving compatibility with the original was more important than a largely pointless improvement in network speed. Given its target market in education this seems like the right choice.

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

A 'crap' product, to borrow a rather obnoxious and overused adjective, would not sell nearly five million units over three years, with steadily increasing volumes. Nor would it have received positive reviews from numerous very competent electronics engineers.

[Monkeh]

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

The Raspberry Pi was released three years ago, long before 'young pretenders' such as the Odroid. At the time there was no cost effective alternative to the integrated USB hub and Ethernet controller.

With the Pi 2 the developers made a deliberate decision that preserving compatibility with the original was more important than a largely pointless improvement in network speed. Given its target market in education this seems like the right choice.

Once again, progress is abandoned for irrelevant compatibility. It's fitting that it runs Windows now..

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

A 'crap' product, to borrow a rather obnoxious and overused adjective, would not sell nearly five million units over three years, with steadily increasing volumes. Nor would it have received positive reviews from numerous very competent electronics engineers.

China sells millions of fake, dangerous phone chargers. I guess they're fine, after all, they sell.

The 'new' CPU is an improvement. But it doesn't bring the Pi ahead of the competition, or frankly even level. It sells on hype and resistance to change.

And before I get accused again of being biased, I shall make a clear statement: I own no large ARM based devboard. I don't have any use for them. I evaluate them based on their capabilities, issues, and price, and the Raspi and Raspi 2 fall short of the competition.

[janoc]

Once again, progress is abandoned for irrelevant compatibility. It's fitting that it runs Windows now..

I would rather rephrase it - un-needed progress is abandoned for very relevant compatibility for their target market.

You are not their target market, Monkeh. If you don't like the design, you are free to buy something else, but I don't see your point of dissing a 35 GBP machine here.

[Monkeh]

Once again, progress is abandoned for irrelevant compatibility. It's fitting that it runs Windows now..

I would rather rephrase it - un-needed progress is abandoned for very relevant compatibility for their target market.

You are not their target market, Monkeh. If you don't like the design, you are free to buy something else, but I don't see your point of dissing a 35 GBP machine here.

Where is the compatibility relevant? It's a kernel module. It makes no userspace difference.

You are free to carry on buying whatever you like, but I'm also free to criticise and recommend IMO superior hardware.

But hey, I've said my piece. Carry on.

[rob77]

i don't know guys why are you bitching so much about the RPi ethernet..... ok it uses more cpu, so what ? it was never intended to be a network gear ! for me and apparently many others (see how much of RPi boards were sold) the ethernet is working just fine if you need a board with high performance ethernet then change your budget limit one order of magnitude higher and there's a lot of options in that budget limit (and don't even try to comment like "Odroid got a 1Gbps ethernet" ... that absolutely doesn't mean it's high performance).

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

let me correct this...   "it sells a lot, therefore it's good ENOUGH"

[rob77]

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

A 'crap' product, to borrow a rather obnoxious and overused adjective, would not sell nearly five million units over three years, with steadily increasing volumes. Nor would it have received positive reviews from numerous very competent electronics engineers.

China sells millions of fake, dangerous phone chargers. I guess they're fine, after all, they sell.

oh dear.... i love human stupidity.... 

comparing a sub-optimal but good-enough and cheap solution (USB ethernet on RPi) with dangerous fake phone chargers from china... man you definitely deserve a nobel prize !  live long and prosper ! 

[Monkeh]

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

A 'crap' product, to borrow a rather obnoxious and overused adjective, would not sell nearly five million units over three years, with steadily increasing volumes. Nor would it have received positive reviews from numerous very competent electronics engineers.

China sells millions of fake, dangerous phone chargers. I guess they're fine, after all, they sell.

oh dear.... i love human stupidity.... 

comparing a sub-optimal but good-enough and cheap solution (USB ethernet on RPi) with dangerous fake phone chargers from china... man you definitely deserve a nobel prize !  live long and prosper ! 

Not comparing the Raspi with phone chargers, simply pointing out the fallacy of equating sales with quality.

[rolycat]

China sells millions of fake, dangerous phone chargers. I guess they're fine, after all, they sell.

oh dear.... i love human stupidity.... 

comparing a sub-optimal but good-enough and cheap solution (USB ethernet on RPi) with dangerous fake phone chargers from china... man you definitely deserve a nobel prize !  live long and prosper ! 

Not comparing the Raspi with phone chargers, simply pointing out the fallacy of equating sales with quality.

You were doing nothing of the kind - it was a ludicrous analogy. Dangerous fake phone chargers do not have a consistent source or brand and if they did no-one would continue to buy them.

[Rigby]

i don't know guys why are you bitching so much about the RPi ethernet..... ok it uses more cpu, so what ? it was never intended to be a network gear ! for me and apparently many others (see how much of RPi boards were sold) the ethernet is working just fine if you need a board with high performance ethernet then change your budget limit one order of magnitude higher and there's a lot of options in that budget limit (and don't even try to comment like "Odroid got a 1Gbps ethernet" ... that absolutely doesn't mean it's high performance).

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

let me correct this...   "it sells a lot, therefore it's good ENOUGH"

No, it's good enough because it is good enough.  No other reason.

I prefer the Beaglebone Black to the Pi (A+ and B+) and that certainly isn't due to sales. It's just a better bit of kit. 

I haven't used a Pi 2, yet.

[linux-works]

The 'new' CPU is an improvement. But it doesn't bring the Pi ahead of the competition, or frankly even level. It sells on hype and resistance to change.

incorrect.

probably THE biggest reason to get a pi: the community support.  there are much lesser used and known boards and they have poor software support, overall.  the pi, while some of its design is pretty 'lame' (I especially hate the layout of the connectors, its not box-mounting friendly; they really could and should have put all connectors on ONE end, like pc motherboards do) - the software is pretty good and actually more stable than the BBB.  I tried for weeks to get a recent kernel and distro to be stable on the beaglebone and each day I'd come in to work to find the bone was frozen (nothing worse than a cold bone, lol).  I gave up for now and I hope the bbb gets to be as stable as the pi, but I've not seen the pi be anywhere near as flakey (kernel wise) as the bone.

so, the strength of any software based item is the community and the pi community is quite large.  same thing as arduino.  value is in the libs, not so much the hardware itself.  libs and apps and lots of people spending time to get the quality up there.

some 'much better' board from china that has only the vendor and a handful of people supporting it?  it will suck and suck badly.

[Kjelt]

Very true. Colleague of mine has a pi running for one and a half years 24/7 and he is still waiting for it too "hang".

[Rigby]

What BBB stability issues are you having?  I have several BBBs and they've never just "hung" or frozen or anything.

[linux-works]

I tried something like 3.14 kernel from a somewhat well known digikey guy (names escapes me right now) but he put together a few distro varieties and none of them stayed up for more than a day or two, tops, for me.  I rebuilt things so many times but each time I used anything more newer than 6mos old, it would be hung the next day when I came into work (I usually put a burn-in script on the system doing a while(1) build of the kernel).

there were multiple reports of instability and they had (maybe still have) problems finding what it was.

I liked the idea of the BBB but I gave up on it for now.  I'll revisit later, but I insist on a recent kernel (3.18 or so would be nice) and the ancient ones that are 'stable' don't really interest me.

if you have a distro that is recent and works, let me know what exact version and I'll grab it and give it another try.  I really want to love the BBB.

[Rigby]

Do you require a newer kernel or do you just want a newer kernel?

Have you tried compiling it yourself?

Maybe I haven't had issues because I haven't left the stable OS release.  I have no need for anything that isn't there.

[linux-works]

there is a general linux instability somewhere in the 3.13 thru 3.18 (or something close to that) kernel version and I wanted to jump to something at least 3.14 or better.  I don't remember what the hardware was but there was a good reason to go to a more recent kernel than the 'stable' distro had.

I'll check the BBB from time to time, and I think they'll get there.  its a better board and better design.  its just not as stable with the current userland and kernel versions, for some reason (for me).

[Monkeh]

Well, has anyone bothered to bisect it? It'd take a while but it's a pretty reliable method of finding the problem.

[linux-works]

Well, has anyone bothered to bisect it? It'd take a while but it's a pretty reliable method of finding the problem.

I can't find the thread, but what I did find (that now rings a bell) was that 3.8 was WAY too old for what I wanted to run, and the next jump was to 3.13 and that was not quite stable or usable.  even going beyond that wasn't making things any better.

also, its robert nelson (which should turn up a lot of search hits) that put the distro together and I think he was (is?) associated with digikey.  not sure if they are sponsoring his work or its all on his own time.  he seems to know what he's doing, so I'm sure the bugs will be worked out and it will be a fine platform to use.  but when I last tried (several months ago) it was 'not ready for prime time' as we say.

[Rigby]

Do you need a whole distro or just a new kernel?  Compile a new kernel if that's all you're after.  It'll take a while, but it'll get you what you're after.

[linux-works]

I think it was more than the kernel, being the problem.

again, its broken 'out of the box' with the robert series I tried.  I did not try his very latest, but a few months ago when I was doing lots of testing between the pi and bbb, robert himself knew there was an instability and was trying his best to find it.  I'm 100% it was -not- just a simple matter  of 'rebuild the kernel'.

[Rigby]

OK, fair enough.  I will restate that I've had several BBBs running for months with no issues.

[linux-works]

but at 3.8 kernel and associated OLD userland (and device tree, etc) right?

3.8 is ancient. 

[MrZwing]

Yes, the Raspi is good for children and child-like (relatively speaking) adults. It is not, however, a good piece of hardware, and bolting on a few extra cores Broadcom found on a dusty shelf is not as big a step forward as they could have taken.

You forgot Beginners, since the Raspi community is large it's easy to get trouble shooting done quickly and find examples and book's.

i hope you don't represent the majority of oDroid C1 community with a attitude like that, sure the pi might not be better (haven't read about oDroid C1 yet) but you hardly get more users by calling them "child-like" but by "have you tried this? here is some link's to get started". I might have interpreted you wrong though i will probably get a Raspi to ply with but i will look at the oDroid C1 always nice to have more then one choice to play around with.

[paf]

Sometimes the stability issues  are  power supply and/or mains interference related.  Use a good power supply for your boards.

[neil555]

I got mine yesterday but after playing with it for a few hours i was seriously underwhelmed, compared to my olinuxino a20 micro (same as Banana Pi) it felt slower and the lack of a SATA port and native ethernet seems like a really sad omission

[Kjelt]

Did you use the four cores?

[Monkeh]

Yes, the Raspi is good for children and child-like (relatively speaking) adults. It is not, however, a good piece of hardware, and bolting on a few extra cores Broadcom found on a dusty shelf is not as big a step forward as they could have taken.

You forgot Beginners, since the Raspi community is large it's easy to get trouble shooting done quickly and find examples and book's.

i hope you don't represent the majority of oDroid C1 community with a attitude like that, sure the pi might not be better (haven't read about oDroid C1 yet) but you hardly get more users by calling them "child-like" but by "have you tried this? here is some link's to get started". I might have interpreted you wrong though i will probably get a Raspi to ply with but i will look at the oDroid C1 always nice to have more then one choice to play around with.

It's all Linux. There's really no need for the userspace environment to be any different.

And no, I don't represent any community, I don't have any of these boards.

[Rasz]

Why shouldn't I comment that the Odroid has a proper interface? No, it won't sustain high throughput, but it is vastly higher performance than the USB crap on the Raspi.

The Raspberry Pi was released three years ago, long before 'young pretenders' such as the Odroid. At the time there was no cost effective alternative to the integrated USB hub and Ethernet controller.

buuulshiiiit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_A1X
at that time you could already buy $40 chinese android allwinter A13 tablets

Again we see the typical argument "It sells a lot, therefore it is good"...

A 'crap' product, to borrow a rather obnoxious and overused adjective, would not sell nearly five million units over three years, with steadily increasing volumes.

kardasians, beliebers, and 50 billion flies eating shit all agree with you.
Rpi wasnt good, it was merely good enough at the right price. It had numerous problems starting with SD interface, ending on disastrous USB stack with hardware bugs and limitations. There is no need for whitewashing.

Nor would it have received positive reviews from numerous very competent electronics engineers.

did it really? was I asleep when that happened? The initiative received positive feedback, not the closed source hardware.

Rpee is ok, but lets not all go crazy just because they merely upgraded cpu to be in line with chinese/korean boards.

[neslekkim]

buuulshiiiit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_A1X
at that time you could already buy $40 chinese android allwinter A13 tablets

But what happens to those Allwinner boards?, I bought an A20 Micro board from Olimex for some time ago, and after the first hype 6-9 months, there have been few updates to kernels and such.. so I have to learn to do it myself unless I want to use an old linux version (the android images did not work very well).

But the Raspberry I bought in may 2012 is still supported with new images every so often.

I wish I had the capability to maintain the a20, because I think that is a much more potent platform, with sata and all kind of stuff, but I don't have the time to dig through the sunxi forums to find out how..

[Rasz]

buuulshiiiit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_A1X
at that time you could already buy $40 chinese android allwinter A13 tablets

But what happens to those Allwinner boards?, I bought an A20 Micro board from Olimex for some time ago, and after the first hype 6-9 months, there have been few updates to kernels and such.. so I have to learn to do it myself unless I want to use an old linux version (the android images did not work very well).

But the Raspberry I bought in may 2012 is still supported with new images every so often.

how is android on your raspee?

I wish I had the capability to maintain the a20, because I think that is a much more potent platform, with sata and all kind of stuff, but I don't have the time to dig through the sunxi forums to find out how..

no one is forcing you to update every other day just for the sake of updating

[Kjelt]

no one is forcing you to update every other day just for the sake of updating

Depends on what you do with it. If you connect it to the bad outside www you better make damn sure you have the recent openssl security patches installed.

[donotdespisethesnake]

It's clear that Raspberry Pi team used Broadcom SOC, not because it was technically appropriate, but because they have strong links with Broadcom who support the project and provide cheap access to the SOC (ie. staff employed by Broadcom in senior role). The Broadcom SOC was basically an old smartphone chip I believe.

It's also clear that Raspberry Pi has built a large user community, the reason for that I believe is that RPi captured early mindshare due to access to the media, in particular the BBC, because one of the RPi team worked with the BBC on the BBC Micro project. Add to that "it's for charity"/"think of the children", and it all took off.

I also believe that a large number of sales go to commercial/industrial users who couldn't care less about the charity aspect, they just see a cheap Linux board they can stick in products.

As we have seen numerous times, the products that succeed may not be technically good, but succeed based on price and marketing.