Raspberry PI 3 on sale

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RTM

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Jan 26, 2014
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To be honest, I am a little underwhelmed by its specifications.
Hardkernel's Odroid-C2 was also made available today, it costs about the same, but has a faster SoC, more (DDR3 vs DDR2) RAM and gigabit ethernet that is not tied to a USB bus.
Granted RPI 3's get better software support and wifi, but is that worth it? (you should definitely consider it for your application).
 

S-F

Member
Feb 9, 2011
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Still only 1 GB RAM though. I think the RAM is limiting these things in many scenarios.
 

izx

Active Member
Jan 17, 2016
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Too bad I can't find it for sale in the US.
Newark/MCM/Ada fruit should have it available this morning. Or do what I did and just order from the UK - - I just ordered mine from Pimoroni, and at $45.17 shipped, it's LESS than what Newark wanted with $8 shipping and $3 sales tax.
 

mackle

Active Member
Nov 13, 2013
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Nice upgrade that opens up a number of new opportunities for the pi family. Its value over alternative products is definitely the community resources.

The improvements at the low end are really bificating my attention into low spec/performance opportunities on the one hand and high performance on the other.
 

izx

Active Member
Jan 17, 2016
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To be honest, I am a little underwhelmed by its specifications.
Hardkernel's Odroid-C2 was also made available today, it costs about the same, but has a faster SoC, more (DDR3 vs DDR2) RAM and gigabit ethernet that is not tied to a USB bus.
Granted RPI 3's get better software support and wifi, but is that worth it? (you should definitely consider it for your application).
Their primary goal is education, not matchbox NAS/media servers. If you don't care about running a desktop environment and don't need Raspbian to handhold you, get the Odroid-C2, put a proper distro on it and it'll push bytes around like the wind.

Support for makers/hackers/tinkered is limited on those other boards, but their primarily goal isn't education so they're OK catering to mostly power users.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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To be honest, I am a little underwhelmed by its specifications.
Hardkernel's Odroid-C2 was also made available today, it costs about the same, but has a faster SoC, more (DDR3 vs DDR2) RAM and gigabit ethernet that is not tied to a USB bus.
Granted RPI 3's get better software support and wifi, but is that worth it? (you should definitely consider it for your application).
I actually ordered an ODROID-C2 earlier today.
 
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Alfa147x

Active Member
Feb 7, 2014
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The Pine64 has the same Broadcom SoC doesn't it?
Oh man I had my heart set reading the specs... Till I got to the preorder part but if they can do Quad core + 2GB for $36 I'm excited

I actually ordered an ODROID-C2 earlier today.
I picked up a older model but never splurged for the eMMC card. Did you guys go for the faster storage or sticking with SD?


This is day one for the ODROID-C2 looking forward to some solid reviews after the initial bugs are sorted out:
* ARM 64bit is a very new platform and some system specific Linux softwares are not working stably at this moment.So there might be the compatibility issues frequently and we may need longer time to fix the issues.
* Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is also on the alpha stage and it causes the instability and incompatibility problems.
 

Patrick

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@Alfa147x I ended up getting the eMMC just to see how it is.

I saw that note and it is totally right. ARM 64 bit is still not there if you want it to just work out of the box.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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I bought RPi 1 and I'm not really getting why you guys keep buying these things. I mean for $129 + $19 = 148 I can get a setup that's low power, more useful, faster, and runs standard x86.

If I wanted to go down to something cheaper: http://www.amazon.com/ECS-Elitegroup-LIVA-X-2GB-32GB/dp/B00SAYE162/ with 2GB and 32GB emmc onboard and has wifi.

By the time you spend $10 for a PSU, $10 for a case, $30 for the eMMC card and $40 for the ARM board you're not too far off anyway. I think for the RPi 1 I bought some $15 USB 2A thing back in the day so it wasn't cheap. And if I tried running what I could to load that CPU in the little RPI 1 case I bought I had it overheated so I needed to add a fan... the cost of the board may be low but the cost of buying all the "stuff" was not.

And both of those options I can get from amazon via prime which I can't do with these new ARM boards.
 

Patrick

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@MiniKnight I want an ARMv8 development platform. With shipping the $40 ODROID-C2 ended up being $115 getting the eMMC, case, power and such. I do not think It will arrive this week.
 

mstone

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Mar 11, 2015
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I bought RPi 1 and I'm not really getting why you guys keep buying these things. I mean for $129 + $19 = 148 I can get a setup that's low power, more useful, faster, and runs standard x86.
I agree that people buying pis as fileservers are nuts--it does a lousy job and that isn't what is was built for. If you're doing generic networking, you're better off with x86. If you want to do low power IoT work that utilizes GPIOs, the ARM platforms will dance rings around x86 solutions. (With the possible exception of the quark stuff, but that's effectively a different platform itself.) My personal choice is the beaglebone, but there are a lot of platforms in the space. For running some relays, checking some sensors, and operating on POE or a very low power source, there isn't an x86 solution that works as well. Just make sure you're picking the right platform for the job.
 
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canta

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Nov 26, 2014
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A W chips? I would avoid that. no support at all :p
people are still reverse-engineering , A W just is ignoring :p

I have A10 and A20 boards from different chinese maker...

last time I put those boards away when accesing GPIO was slow.. and no way to access via API. the only way to use was kernel module that create life system for GPIO :p..
 

mackle

Active Member
Nov 13, 2013
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I bought RPi 1 and I'm not really getting why you guys keep buying these things. I mean for $129 + $19 = 148 I can get a setup that's low power, more useful, faster, and runs standard x86.
For me it's the 40 GPIO headers and all the hundreds of write ups people have done on their projects. I want to string together a bunch of thermistors to monitor crawl-space and water pipe temperatures? I can read through any number of projects and copy and paste code. I never bought a case and I had enough spare extras around the house that I didn't need to buy any additionals (the micro-sd card came from getting a bigger card for my GoPro).

I agree that people buying pis as fileservers are nuts--it does a lousy job and that isn't what is was built for.
I experimented with it as a file server for all of about 2 hours haha.

I'd love to know how much it cost them to get wireless onto the card.
 
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Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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deslok.dyndns.org
I bought RPi 1 and I'm not really getting why you guys keep buying these things. I mean for $129 + $19 = 148 I can get a setup that's low power, more useful, faster, and runs standard x86.

If I wanted to go down to something cheaper: Amazon.com: ECS Elitegroup Liva LIVA-X 2GB/32GB Desktop: Computers & Accessories with 2GB and 32GB emmc onboard and has wifi.

By the time you spend $10 for a PSU, $10 for a case, $30 for the eMMC card and $40 for the ARM board you're not too far off anyway. I think for the RPi 1 I bought some $15 USB 2A thing back in the day so it wasn't cheap. And if I tried running what I could to load that CPU in the little RPI 1 case I bought I had it overheated so I needed to add a fan... the cost of the board may be low but the cost of buying all the "stuff" was not.

And both of those options I can get from amazon via prime which I can't do with these new ARM boards.
I ended up doing a similar calculation for someone who wanted to build a digital photo frame(they were going to pull pictures from instagram) using an Rpi about two weeks ago, it was cheaper to spend ~100 on a tablet that was the size they wanted than all the bits to make the Rpi functional.