I’m thinking about experimenting with raspberry pi.
I know you guys have played with it, so where do you suggest I get started?
Suggestions, recommendations, things to avoid, bring it on.
I haven’t played with Raspberry Pi (more of a BeagleBone and Arduino user) but the Maker series of manuals is a good place to start.
Stranger
If you’re comfortable with linux, it’s just about impossible to go wrong. $35. Ok, you need a power brick for it, so another $4 for a cheapo micro-USB phone charger. You get it, you flash your SD card with an OS image, you boot it up (no monitor required, it does DHCP and has an SSH server), you log in and go to town. “apt-get install” to your heart’s content (it’s ubuntu based – if you aren’t familiar with apt-get you’ll need to get there, but that’s nothing raspberry pi specific).
If you want, you can attach a monitor on the HDMI output, but that’s not really necessary. It’s a lot faster and more capable than you think, and I understand the rpi2 is a whole bunch faster than that (I have a B+ and haven’t gotten around to getting the v2 yet).
The real question is: whatcha gonna do with it? 
ETA: Oh, don’t forget to buy an SD card like I did. Nothing like getting your pi and then realizing you don’t have an extra microSD handy and then having to wait another day or so to actually use it. 
No it’s not Ubuntu based. It’s Debian based. The O/S you are describing is called Raspbian for a reason (not Raspuntu). There are also half a dozen other O/S that work to varying degrees of competency…
For video and general Linux ability, Raspbian works quite well. There is also a Window’s port that is perhaps better for the general user. Personally I use Raspbian.
I have tried a Fedora port that was not very effective. I imagine an Ubuntu port would have similar failings.
Stick with Raspbian or Windows for best chance of success.
Of course. Brainfart. I blame beer.
I can’t imagine why an Ubuntu port would fail, given how closely Ubuntu is based on Debian, which, as you said, does quite well. There’s no reason the Pi would have to run the default Ubuntu GUI (Unity, these days) when Ubuntu already has many and varied GUIs right there in its package repositories, some of which are designed explicitly for low-resource systems.
Anyway, the main attraction of a Raspberry Pi is having the fun of an embedded system without the annoyance of the kinds of development environments which usually go along with Real World embedded systems. (Because being a grown-up means being constantly annoyed by someone else’s cheaping out, it seems.) One simple project is to install some specialized software to make the Raspberry Pi a media center. It’s one more way to get movies from a storage device here to a big screen there. Raspbmc is one way to do this; it’s packaged as an out-of-the-box system, but it’s ultimately Debian on the inside, so it’s more expandable than, say, a Roku, if you want to tinker.
And, of course, tinkering is the main point. The Raspberry Pi is an educational/hobbyist platform, like the Altair 8800 and the KENBAK-1 (first personal computer!) before it. There’s plenty of GPIO ports and hardware to attach to them, it has an Ethernet port and USB ports and an HDMI output besides, and it is cheap enough that if you somehow manage to destroy one it isn’t the end of the world.
I was (and still am) a RHEL/Centos man. I would never dream of using Fedora in anything critical. I’m fairly sure the same applies to Ubuntu & Debian.
In both cases the downstream distro is used for experimentation prior to changes in the upstream. Downstream may give getter gui experience but stabiiity is way lower and updates are continual.
Given all that, Rasbian works well on Pi and in particular it uses the Pi hardware to decode HD video extremely well. That is the only reason I got a Pi and started to use Debian/Raspbian. As a media player the Pi is very very good.
I can’t comment on the Windows port other than to say that my experience with Windows CE on ARM was that it was competent but very limited. I assume it will now the Pi port will also be competent and somewhat less limited especially in the graphic interface area.
The Raspberry pi is a solution looking for a problem. Normally, that would be a criticism, but I don’t mean it like that…
I own one and I think it’s great, but like many, I bought it without any specific idea of what I wanted to do with it. As a result, I have played with it a lot, but not committed to anything exciting or specific.
It’s better to have begun with a requirement in mind, then sought the Raspberry pi as a solution. Interestingly, I am also doing this at work - I have a requirement to implement a bunch of departure board type video screens in a busy warehouse - at the moment, we use windows PCs, but all it needs is a browser.
Yes, it’s a solution to a problem that may not be the problem you actually have.
Specifically : are you building a robot control system or some kind of embedded system? You probably actually want an arduino for that. Here’s why :
Raspberry Pi - You have to load up an entire operating system and direct hardware access requires drivers like any OS. This means any code you write that accesses things like certain GPIO pins on the board is actually making driver calls. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to have hardware PWM drive circuits, it’s done in software, so I found for a project of mine that it can’t generate a clean PWM signal to control a servo directly. Also, messing with the OS - different versions, installing drivers at the command line, and so forth eats up a lot of valuable time you don’t want to spend if the project doesn’t demand it.
Arduino - You access the hardware using a program written in Arduino C. All the library functions that actually access the hardware directly are given as source with the arduino IDE, you can edit them whenever you want. (I was able to mess with a stepper motor library directly, for instance)
Your device will operate in a clean, predictable manner - there isn’t any OS, and your C program essentially controls all execution. Some of the bigger, more expensive arduinos such as Intel’s variant have tons of compute power and memory - though if you write an efficient control loop in C this probably won’t be a problem in any case.
Building a control system for a device such as a quadcopter, ground robot, engine controller, and so on? That’s what the arduinos are for.
Building an image recognition system, a device that needs to connect to the internet, a device that drives a high resolution display, a front end control panel? That’s what a raspberry Pi is more for.
Some projects like sophisticated robots need both. There are boards that have bothon a single board.
One robot project I built used both. The raspberry pi was used for it’s access to bluetooth onboard, and it simply passed the commands through to the arduino which did all the work of polling the sensors and then calculating the output for each separate PID channel for each control axis.
In retrospect, the raspberry pi was just a waste of space and I should have connected a bluetooth radio module connected to the controller more directly. It would have saved a ton of time I wasted fighting with the Pi at the command line trying to get stuff to work.
It’s finally happened: a thread I can read and not understand a single thing being discussed. Fascinating.
I’ve been following with interest the Raspberry Pi since it’s intro. But not enough to get one. But the announcement of the new Raspberry Pi 2 is probably going to push be over the edge. Quadcore, 1GB.
I’m waiting for kits (including PS, case, etc.) to become generally available.
There has been a vague announcement that there’s going to be a developers version of Windows 10 available for the Pi. Presumably only for the newer model. (The older model was rated the same as a Pentium II 300Mhz.)
While a lot of OSes are listed as running on the Pi, many are really just patched together things that don’t really live up to the original version. Running a current version of Android, for example, is problematic.
There’s quite a lot of lovely stuff here:
For me that happened in Cafe Society. What the hell is a lady gaga?
I got a Raspberry Pi for my 8 year-old niece for Christmas last year. I set it up, and installed Minecraft, and she was off and running. She even started learning programing. Now I’m thinking about getting one for myself. If nothing else, I could use it to watch Hulu on my TV, which now requires dragging a full-sized laptop over there.
I got a B+ for Christmas, and so far, I’m just using it as a media player on my TV. I put a movie or TV show file on a USB thumb drive, plug that into the Pi, and then use a laptop from the couch to control playback.
I’d really like to have DVR functionality, but I think the Pi I have doesn’t have the horsepower, at least I couldn’t find any projects for it. Would the v2 be able to do that?
If you just want a cheap way to screw around with Linux and make a media server or something like that, you might want to look into a Pogoplug. They’re Windows based file servers that you can install Linux on and use them for whatever. I have one that controls home automation and with a network/usb drive, acts as a media server. The upside is that it’s a small polished box opposed to a naked circuit board. The downside is that you wouldn’t use it to embed into something else.
Make sure you buy the new, upgraded version.
$105 for a Pi 2 board and kit? This is why I’m waiting a bit. You can get good Pi B kits for $70 or less. And since the official price for the board is the same …
Aren’t there a couple of OS images for it that are designed for exactly that? Openelec and Raspbmc I think.