Adafruit Pi Box http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyHudYAOVRY&feature=player_detailpage
An enclosure for the Raspberry Pi. A clever design made from laser cut polycarbonate that snaps together without fasteners. Also from the Adafruit Twitter feed: First Steps with the Raspberry Pi http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20120603051148201/RaspberryPi-Introduction.html The first thing to surprise you about the Raspberry Pi is the size. It is slightly larger than a credit card, but with ports and sockets jutting out of each side. ... Without a case, users are exposed to the bare printed circuit board. [...] The Raspberry Pi's creators, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, want to spark children's interest in computer programming and encourage students to apply for computing degrees. [...] The Raspberry Pi has more in common with smartphones and set top boxes than it does with desktop machines. At the heart of the Pi is the BCM2835 System on a Chip which powers some smartphones and streaming players such as the Roku 2 HD player. With the large volume of chips in production costs can be kept to a minimum. [...] Obviously, the Raspberry Pi board, in itself, is not sufficient to get you up and running. It is, after all, just a bare board. ...we gathered up spare SD and SDHC cards, HDMI cable, ethernet cable, USB keyboard, USB mouse, 5V phone charger, and a monitor. After plugging in the leads and having loaded the Raspbian distribution to a 16GB SDHC card, we were set to rumble. [...] The SoC provides OpenGL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG and 1080p HD video. As you can see from the above specification, the Raspberry Pi does not have onboard wireless capabilities, but it is possible to use a USB-connected wifi dongle, although only some devices are supported. Neither does the Raspberry Pi have a real time clock. [...] It is easy to overclock both the CPU, RAM, and GPU of the Raspberry Pi by editing a single text file (/boot/config.txt), although this activity voids the warranty. Some users have reported speed increases of about 20%, without apparently affecting the stability of the machine. The article goes on to cover Distributions, Benchmarks, Software, and Things to Do with the Raspberry Pi. I wasn't aware that this was the same SoC used in the Roku. Somewhere I had gotten the impression that the Raspberry Pi was the first device to use this Broadcom part. (I've never gone searching for it, but I've never ran across mention of people hacking Roku boxes. Don't they run Linux? Are they GPL compliant (at least to the extent of releasing source and binaries so you can load a modified firmware)? Makes me wonder if the Raspberry Pi might spur development of Roku compatible distributions such that there will be a selection of semi-open firmware that can be loaded onto a Roku. The Roku is still pretty cheap ($50 ~ $100), and likely a nicer package (enclosure, remote) if you are looking for a set-top-box.) Kurt Keville wrote: > I have been reading on some of the DebDev boards that the Raspberry > "might" be capable of supporting an armhf distro... that would > austenibly fix a few performance issues. This article covers testing with an armhf flavor of Debian: For the purpose of this review, we have tested the Raspberry Pi mainly using Raspbian, an unofficial port of Debian Wheezy armhf. Unlike Debian "squeeze", Raspbian is optimised for floating point operations, which helps to speed up some applications. [...] Raspbian does not come with a hardware-accelerated video player, so we have not tested the true capabilities of the GPU. Unsurprisingly, running MPlayer...on Raspbian did not generate good results with video lagging badly. If you want to use a hardware-accelerated video player, we would suggest you try out either OpenELEC or Raspbmc, both XBMC-centric operating systems, or omxplayer, a video player specifically made for the Raspberry Pi's GPU. Using XBMC opens up the ability to play videos including YouTube videos. All of the distributions are waiting for hardware accelerated drivers for X to be developed. The current X server used by the Pi does not allow EXA acceleration. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
