September | 2012 | Raspberry Pi

East Coast Americans: come and meet Eben and Liz in NY, NC, SC and FL!

Next week, Eben and I are undertaking a somewhat epic drive to visit a few US hackspaces which got missed out on Rob’s hackspace tour. (Rob, we believe, is currently somewhere around Washington DC, and very sleepy.) We’ve work to do here in New York and Maker Faire to visit over the next few days, then we’re off to Washington DC ourselves for more meetings. Then we’ll be driving south with the specific intention of visiting some of you who complained you were being ignored by Rob’s schedule.

I’ve had several emails from parents this week asking if hackspaces, maker labs and the like are suitable environments for children. The answer to that is an emphatic YES. Please bring your kids; these are great places to learn in a really engaging, non-structured way, and are very child-friendly.

People in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Gulf Coast and…everywhere else – please don’t panic. We will get to you, hopefully pretty soon. We’re under-resourced and this country of yours is enormous; we’re working at getting to as many places as we can. And yes, Europe; we’ll be visiting you soon too.

New York

We will be visiting Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science on Saturday 29 September. We’ll be there all day, and a (finite) number of Raspberry Pis will be on sale in the Make Shed. Eben is speaking on the Live Stage (I believe he’s cooked up some new material!) at 12.30. We don’t have a stand this year; instead we’ll be wandering around. I’ll try to tweet occasionally about where we are if you want to come and say hi; we look forward to meeting some more of you!

Charlotte, NC

On Wednesday October 3, we’ll be visiting Hackerspace Charlotte at 7pm for a talk about the Raspberry Pi project and a poke around your projects. It’s best (as with all of these events) if you contact the Hackerspace before coming to let them know you’ll be turning up, but they can handle walk-ins.

Columbia, SC

Eben is lecturing at the OpenITLab at IT-ology in Columbia at 2pm on Thursday October 4. The lecture’s free to attend for the public, but you’ll have to register – you can do so here.

Charleston, SC

We’ll be visiting Makelab Charleston at 5.30pm on Thursday October 4. Please visit this link to sign up for free, as tickets are limited.

Longwood/Orlando, FL

On October 5 we’ll be at FamiLAB in Longwood at 7pm. If you’d like to come, please sign up for free. On Saturday September 29, FamiLAB are holding a Raspberry Pi hacking day, so if you’d like to get some work done on your project before we roll up later in the week, then’s your chance!

Wired opinion piece from Pete Lomas

This is so good I’d kick myself if any of you missed it – head straight to Wired and read what Pete has to say about the manufacturing process and design decisions we’ve been dealing with up until now. It’s a great piece.

Qt5 and the Raspberry Pi

The Qt community has been doing some great stuff with their Raspberry Pis. (It’s been pointed out to me in the comments that half of you don’t know what Qt is. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject, which is less long-winded than I would be.) First up, some video from Kaitsu, who ported his Qt5 Cinematic Experience demo to the Pi (watch those shaders go!):

Sources and more are available at Kaitsu’s blog.

Then there’s this Qt5 Wayland compositor demo from Samuel Rødal.

Samuel says that this Wolfenstein/workspace mashup also runs on the Pi. (Source code for this one is on Github, and we love it.)

And then there’s this trail emitters demo from Topguyz.

Demos like this get very excited about what you might be able to see on the Raspberry Pi soon. There’s potential to do some really cool stuff with the Pi and Qt5; and we’ve a feeling that the surface has barely been scratched. Seen or made something brilliant with Qt5 on a Raspberry Pi? Let us know!

New York, New York!

Eben and I are headed back to the US on Wednesday. We’ve got meetings on Thursday and Friday in New York, then we’ll be at Maker Faire in Brooklyn on Saturday. Eben’s giving a talk on the Live Stage this year about the first, terrifying six months of Raspberry Pi. You’ll also be able to buy Raspberry Pis in the Maker Shed.

I can’t believe it’s only been a year. Maker Faire NY was the first large event of this kind that the Raspberry Pi Foundation did back in 2011, way before we started shipping. Our world has shifted seismically since then; Eben’s talk’s going to be a good one. We’re really looking forward to it, and we’re looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible. Please come and say hi if you see us; we get a real kick out of meeting you and talking Pi. Eben’s talk will be live streamed on Make’s G+ page, so if you can’t make it, you can still watch.

The meeting I’m looking forward to the most is one we’re planning on doing over dinner, with Limor “LadyAda” Fried and Phil Torrone from Adafruit; we’re going to be talking about Adafruit’s amazing work with the Raspberry Pi, and what we can do together in the future. Their most recent announcement has been a WebIDE for Raspberry Pi, currently in Alpha development. Take a look:

You can read more about Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi WebIDE over on their blog.

Eben and I are also hanging around over the next week; we’re seeing some friends in DC and having yet more meetings, then we’ll be driving south, stopping at a few hackspaces on the way. I’m not allowed to publicise these events until the hackspaces we’ve been talking to can figure out if they can handle walk-ins for fire safety reasons, but you’ll be able to read all about it in the next couple of days.

Factory pictures from South Wales

A very quick set of photos taken this morning at the Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales, where Raspberry Pis are being built at a rate of around 2500 a day. Pete, Eben, Mike from Farnell and I were visiting the factory to celebrate its 20th anniversary (and the 40th anniversary of Sony in Wales). This is a bit quick and dirty – these were taken with my phone. We’ll have some nicer photos and some video of the line, the automated processes and some pictures of the whole team to show you later on, but I know a lot of you were waiting to see these today: so here they are!

Gail, doing a final visual check and packing the units into antistatic bags for shipment.

Joanne and Pam, working on final testing

Some of the larger parts are hand-mounted. Ricky is checking and soldering here.

The Raspberry Pis are produced in panels of six. This is Jane, who is very gamely posing for a picture for me.

Up periscope!

Highly magnified side view of the PoP stack, moments after exiting the oven. Note the difference in ball pitch between the RAM (top layer), and the BCM2835 processor chip (bottom layer).

Fashion plate Pete Lomas, last heard shouting: “I wish I’d brought my electrostatic clogs!” So do we, Pete. So do we.

Thursday grab bag

I’m in a bit of a rush today; we’re driving down to Wales with Pete in an hour or so to visit the UK factory, which is celebrating a special anniversary tomorrow. So here’s a grab bag of stuff from around the internet that people have been doing with their Pis. You guys have been having a busy week.

Beer Church, a group attached to the hackspace at Pumping Station:One in Chicago, have been brewing the good stuff using Raspberry Pis to control cooling.

This isn’t the only brewing project we’re aware of, but it’s the first we’ve seen pictures from. If you’re using your Raspberry Pi to control fermentation (bread, beer or kimchee), please drop us a line; we’d love to hear from you.

Rob’s hackspace tour of the US continues, and the photos that are emerging make the rest of us wish we were there with him – it looks brilliant. Our friends from Adafruit dropped by last night’s event at NYCResistor. A couple of photos below: you can see more on Adafruit. Rob has added an extra stop today: if you’re in the CS Lounge at Colombia University at 5.30pm, he’ll be there to talk about Pi.

Lady Ada demonstrates Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi PoV wand

Rob, capturing hearts and minds.

Back in the UK, Chris Roffey got in touch to tell us about a series of Coding Club books he’s writing for kids. You can read more about the series by clicking on the image, and there’s a PDF you can preview of the introduction to the Python Basics book, due next month.

One of my favourite projects this week has been this face recognition security camera from Kean Walmsley. He says: “Here’s the elevator pitch: Facecam is a security camera that recognises a resident’s Facebook friends when they come to their front door and allows for tailored communication both to the resident and the visitor.” Read more about it here and here.

Not all projects have to have productive value, though: here’s a Raspberry Pi missile launcher for your office from itr8r.

Raspberry Pi Retaliation. Click to visit site and download source code.

Heather heard someone call their Raspberry Pi a “Raspberry Pee Eye”, and was inspired to make this crocheted raspberry complete with Tom Selleck moustache.

Click to visit Heather’s blog.

And here’s a bit of video: aaa801 has got open webOS, HP’s mobile/tablet operating system, running on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

“This video shows the first public build of open webOS running on the Raspberry Pi. There is no GUI at this point in time for ARM builds, there should be one within a month or so. When the GUI is up and running I will release a ROM to the community.” Thanks aaa801 – we’re looking forward to it!

Right. I’m off to Wales. Wish me luck with the caravans.

Introducing turbo mode: up to 50% more performance for free

Since launch, we’ve supported overclocking and overvolting your Raspberry Pi by editing config.txt. Overvolting provided more overclocking headroom, but voided your warranty because we were concerned it would decrease the lifetime of the SoC; we set a sticky bit inside BCM2835 to allow us to spot boards which have been overvolted.

We’ve been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a “turbo mode”, which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty. We are happy that the combination of only applying turbo when busy, and limiting turbo when the BCM2835′s internal temperature reaches 85°C, means there will be no measurable reduction in the lifetime of your Raspberry Pi.

You can now choose from one of five overclock presets in raspi-config, the highest of which runs the ARM at 1GHz. The level of stable overclock you can achieve will depend on your specific Pi and on the quality of your power supply; we suggest that Quake 3 is a good stress test for checking if a particular level is completely stable. If you choose too high an overclock, your Pi may fail to boot, in which case holding down the shift key during boot up will disable the overclock for that boot, allowing you to select a lower level.

What does this mean? Comparing the new image with 1GHz turbo enabled, against the previous image at 700MHz, nbench reports 52% faster on integer, 64% faster on floating point and 55% faster on memory.

Previous image (2012-08-16-wheezy-raspbian):

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          222.08  :       5.70  :       1.87
STRING SORT         :          31.659  :      14.15  :       2.19
BITFIELD            :      7.1294e+07  :      12.23  :       2.55
FP EMULATION        :          44.808  :      21.50  :       4.96
FOURIER             :          2188.1  :       2.49  :       1.40
ASSIGNMENT          :          2.6545  :      10.10  :       2.62
IDEA                :          671.41  :      10.27  :       3.05
HUFFMAN             :           414.2  :      11.49  :       3.67
NEURAL NET          :          2.9586  :       4.75  :       2.00
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          77.374  :       4.01  :       2.89
=====================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS=====================
INTEGER INDEX       : 11.414
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 3.619
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, ...
=========================LINUX DATA BELOW==========================
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : Linux 3.1.9+
C compiler          : arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc
libc                : static
MEMORY INDEX        : 2.447
INTEGER INDEX       : 3.192
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.007
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, ..
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

New image, with 1GHz turbo enabled:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :           340.8  :       8.74  :       2.87
STRING SORT         :           47.52  :      21.23  :       3.29
BITFIELD            :        1.05e+08  :      18.01  :       3.76
FP EMULATION        :           66.32  :      31.82  :       7.34
FOURIER             :            3431  :       3.90  :       2.19
ASSIGNMENT          :          4.5311  :      17.24  :       4.47
IDEA                :          991.67  :      15.17  :       4.50
HUFFMAN             :          615.08  :      17.06  :       5.45
NEURAL NET          :            4.76  :       7.65  :       3.22
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          135.12  :       7.00  :       5.05
=====================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS=====================
INTEGER INDEX       : 17.356
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.933
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, ...
=========================LINUX DATA BELOW==========================
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : Linux 3.2.27+
C compiler          : arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc
libc                : static
MEMORY INDEX        : 3.810
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.768
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 3.291
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, ..
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Other changes to the latest firmware include:

Temperature and frequency widgets

You can enable a core temperature widget for the lxde taskbar to see how close to 85°C you get (in the UK, it’s not very), and a cpufreq widget that will show the current ARM frequency when you hover over it. See here for more details.

USB interrupt rate reduction

We have enabled Gordon’s “FIQ Fix” in the USB driver, which reduces the USB interrupt rate, improving general performance by about 10%.

WiFi is now supported out of the box

If your WiFi driver is supported by the default linux tree, or is based on the popular RTL8188CUS chipset, then WiFi should work out of the box. Boot the image with the WiFi dongle plugged in (a powered hub is recommended). Run startx and select “WiFi Config”. You can scan for wireless networks and enter your wireless password and connect from the GUI. No need to install additional packages or scripts.

Improved analogue audio

Analogue audio quality has been improved.

Extra software installed by default

SmartSim and PenguinsPuzzle are pre-installed.

If you are using an older wheezy image, you can upgrade: “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade” will get almost all these improvements.

Thanks to MrEngman for his amazing work supporting users with various WiFi dongle, Dorian Peake for the cpufreq and temperature drivers, and Dmitry Dudkin for his work on the USB and SD card drivers.

Alex has started a forum thread for further discussion – pile in!

The Raspberry Pi User Guide is here! Win a signed copy.

It’s here a month earlier than the expected publishing date because the typesetting elves have been working their tiny hats off. You can now buy the Raspberry Pi User Guide, written by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree, in good old-fashioned book form, with pages made out of paper and everything, which will please those of you who were holding out because you don’t like e-books.

The User Guide serves as an in-depth manual for the Raspberry Pi. It’ll teach you the basics like where to plug the cables in and how to turn it on and use the terminal, and then lead you through learning how to configure it, how to program, how to set it up as a web server, how to use it as a media centre, how to use the GPIO to read buttons and flash lights, and more. I’ve got a copy (already coffee-stained) on my desk, and it’s fantastic; Eben, Gareth and the editorial and production teams at Wiley have done a beautiful job.

If you’d like to win a copy signed by Eben (I may be able to get Gareth to sign it too if I see him in time), just leave a comment below saying exactly what you’d like him to write in his dedication to you. The best/funniest/most tear-jerking will win a signed copy of the book – and some highly sought-after stickers if Rob has any left after his tour of the US. I’ll announce the winner next week.

Showing service states on a traffic light

When I was about fifteen, I was an inveterate thief of temporary street furniture – no, I have no idea why. Hormones are funny things. Just in case anyone from Mid Beds County Council happens to be reading, I am very, very sorry. There were several bollards in my bedroom, a cat’s eye which my uncle (possibly while under the influence) had liberated from a street in the dead of night, and a no parking sign on the wardrobe door.

I never had a traffic light.

Raspberry Pi hooked up to a traffic light

♪ ♫ I like traffic lights, although my name’s not Bamber.

Magnus Lubeck has a traffic light (which he acquired through legal means), and he’s been using it – powered by a Raspberry Pi, of course – in place of a big display screen in his office for monitoring service states using Nagios/op5. Here’s some video.

There’s much more on Magnus’s blog, along with circuit diagrams and code, which you can use yourself if you happen to somehow come into possession of your own traffic light. He mentions the first application like this he ever saw, where a pub toilet lock was hooked up to a traffic light so you didn’t have to check whether there was someone in there or not. I’ve been thinking of ideas for this application from visual kitchen timers, to free parking space detectors, to instant message notifiers; although I feel it’s probably best not to get into the habit of using street furniture as interior decoration again. Add your own ideas below!

Guest post from Manchester University – prizes, birdbrains and more.

Liz: Here’s a guest post from our friend Dr Andrew Robinson at the University of Manchester, who has been leading a team of undergraduates this summer (most of whom seem to be called Tom – hi, Toms, it was a pleasure to meet you) in developing school projects and materials around the Raspberry Pi. They’ve got big plans for the coming months, including a contest, more schools outreach, festival appearances, work with kids and some fun with a Raspberry Pi-enabled birdbox (which had its very own table in the pub here in Cambridge when they last came to visit). Over to Andrew, who will explain a bit more about what they’ve been up to.

At the School of Computer Science at The University of Manchester we want to get more people interested in computer science and using Raspberry Pi. As such we’re launching the Great British Raspberry Pi Bake Off, a competition to get people making projects with a Raspberry Pi. We’ve also produced some example projects and sample worksheets to help people get started.

The competition has categories for under 18s and over 18s so everyone can enter, and they’ll be loads of hot tech prizes to win! We’ll make an official announcement soon on our competition page with the full rules.

We’re very lucky to have some of our talented students working for us; they’ve been paid to play – sorry, to develop – with Raspberry Pi over the summer. How cool is that? They’ve produced activities that teachers will be able to use in the classroom, but more importantly, that are really fun. You’ll be able to try the activities yourself at the Manchester Science Festival – we’ll be publishing more details soon.

Our Raspberry Pi bird box is the result of one of these projects. It’s got light beams that detect when a bird enters or leaves which then sends a message so you know to look out your window or it will take a photo. We’ll be adding other sensors for temperature, weight, etc. and combining these with image recognition from the camera to get some data mining going.

We want lots of people building their own nest boxes all feeding data back to bird mission control, a central webserver where you’ll be able to monitor bird activity across the world in real time! Using our Python and Scratch libraries with our hardware interfaces, even an absolute beginner can get something going in a matter of minutes.

With the help of MOSI and STEMNET we’re supporting teachers and STEM ambassadors to take Raspberry Pi activities into schools. The first sessions booked up in 3 hours, so we’ll be scheduling more soon. We’re developing activities that bridge the gap between what kids are interested in, e.g. nature, music or crafts; and computer science.

So, how can you join in the fun? Get your thinking caps on for a project to enter in to the bake off. Full details will be published later in September. [Liz: we'll be publicising them here when the guys in Manchester are ready.] If you’re a teacher or group leader (e.g. Scouts) then get in touch if you’re interested in knowing more about our worksheets, or want to come to one our sessions. Just leave your details on our website. We look forward to hearing from you!