A new little computer: the Raspberry Pi…

January 6, 2013 | Raspberry Pi | By: Mark VandeWettering

Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. The simple fact is that I haven’t done a lot that’s very interesting lately. But Carmen did buy me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas, and I’ve been playing with it a bit. As it happens, we had a power outage over on the 26th, and when my rapidly aging FreeBSD server (a 1Ghz Via C3 Nehamiah processor, released in 2003, if memory served) rebooted, one of its drives seems to have failed. I mostly use this machine for an ssh and IRC server, some local web and file serving, and the odd bit of Python and C programming. I have been considering replacing this 10 year old machine, but until I get around to putting something reasonable in it’s place, I thought I’d see if the Raspberry Pi could serve.

And the answer is yes, it can.

I installed the Raspbian distribution of Debian, and plugged it into my router. Enabled ssh, and voila! Works great. Well, it’s pretty slow. I have a class 4 4GB card serving as its only storage, which is not exactly brilliant, and the 700Mhz clock rate is pretty… well… slow, even by comparison to the 1Ghz machine it’s replacing. But it does work! It’s even got an X server, which isn’t exactly zippy, but which does work.

For fun, I thought I’d give it a bit more of a test. I installed simh, and then transferred my TOPS-10 disk images over. The Raspberry Pi actually makes a pretty nice little PDP-10 simulator. I’ll have to benchmark it later, but it seems to work just fine.

I’ll have more details later, but for $35, it’s a lot of computer. Barely more than an Arduino Uno, but with a lot more capability.

Highly recommended.

Comments

Comment from Elwood Downey, WB0OEW
Time 1/6/2013 at 11:01 am

The graphs you see on my ham page at http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham are created by a Pi every hour. It goes out to several sites to aggregate the raw data, draws the graphs with gnuplot and pushes them to my real web server. Just as in your case, I used to do this on a old desktop but when it died I thought I’d try the Pi. Bonus is it uses/wastes a lot less power than the old system also. At first my Pi was not very reliable. Blogs suggested it could be low power or flakey SD card. Sure enough, my little USB supply only produced 4.5 V at the Pi when it was running which is border line. I fixed that with a 5.25V USB supply from Adafruit. While there I picked up an SD card from them also. Now my Pi has been running without a hitch for over a month. It could do a lot more so I’ll be on the lookout for more ideas for the Pi.

Comment from Mark VandeWettering
Time 1/6/2013 at 1:51 pm

That is something to be wary of. I have a Dlink powered USB hub that is supposed to provide 2A of current on its charging port, but when I try to use it to power the Raspberry Pi, it starts to boot but then recycles. I haven’t measured the voltage drop, but I suspect it’s not quite good enough. The Pi pulls at least 700ma, so not every USB power supply will work (nominally a USB supply only needs to supply 500ma).

Comment from Kimmeh
Time 1/6/2013 at 11:12 pm

I replaced my router with a raspi a while back, which is an enormous freedom. Other uses include IRC, SSH, a web server, and everything is hooked up a UPS, so even when the power goes out for a day or two, everything is still tugging along smoothly.

Comment from Kevin Seghetti
Time 1/12/2013 at 9:17 am

Gotta love that we live in an age where a 700Mhz cpu is considered slow. (I remember not having computers in the home at all, and when we finally got one, it ran a 1Mhz (and a whole lot less in a cycle that the RPi CPU does)).
I recently started playing with one of these as well, it is pretty darn cool for the price. I especially like that it is a full Linux install, not a stripped busybox configuration like I am used to on small devices.