amuck-landowner

Raspberry PI 3 Now Launched!

willie

Active Member
If anyone cares, Adafruit sent me an in-stock notification about 7 hours ago, but I only clicked the link just now and it was out of stock again.  It still means units are arriving, so I'd say add yourself to the notification list and jump reasonably quick when the email comes.  I myself am not in a terrible hurry for a pi3 though.  I still have a never-booted Beaglebone Black sitting in a box that I've had various ideas for.  One of these days.
 

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
My RPi3 shipped yesterday even though the order confirmation had the shipping ETA for the 8th. :)
 

raj

Active Member
My current fav: ODROID-XU4
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G143452239825

  • Samsung Exynos5422 Cortex™-A15 2Ghz and Cortex™-A7 Octa core CPUs
  • Mali-T628 MP6(OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0/1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile)
  • 2Gbyte LPDDR3 RAM PoP stacked
  • 2 x USB 3.0 Host, 1 x USB 2.0 Host
  • Gigabit Ethernet port
  • HDMI 1.4a for display

One of the ARM boards with an extra USB 3 Hub controller. ARM itself is only supporting generic USB core with USB 1.1 and 2.0.

It's a beautiful board.  i've had it for a bit now and its completely replaced my daily driver "desktop".
 

TheLinuxBug

New Member
Thanks mates!


I Guess what I was brainstorming for a bit there was maybe thinking about using an ARM device as a cheap (and energy efficient) way of setting up a storage server at home.  


I guess at the current level, there isn't much available to setup a proper storage node besides going the atom + hdd route. 

This is not true at all.  I run a rather reliable NAS server with a A20 (2x1Ghz, 1Gb ram, Gigabit nic). I ordered one of the pcDunio Nano's that were $15, a ~$55 SYBA SATA PM/Raid card (JMB393) (Check Newegg), then using an old case from a old celeron with a 180watt power supply I wired up 5x2TB SATA III (3gbps) (~$250.00 USD for 'Refurb' on Newegg) drives to the raid card.  I ran Openmediavault BananaPi distribution with some of my own tweaks and changes.  I have already had one drive fail on me and rebuild without any issues.  I have not put a kill-a-watt on it so I am not sure its current full power draw, but I was even able to wire the A20 to run off the 5v rail from the power supply so everything is powered by the PSU in the case.


I do of course have a few good fans going in this case, as well for 3 of the drives I actually bought one of those 2 5.25" to 3x3.5" Enclosures that has fans and also provides hot-swap ability for 3 of the 5 drives (other two are inside the case, it is an old HP Pavillion case if that rings any bells).


You can see some pictures of my setup here, but these are when I still had my BananaPi in the mix instead of the pcDuino board, they are pretty much the same things except the BananaPi has composite video out built on without the need for an additional cable (and the pcDuino Nano was cheaper).  I have since put my BananaPi to another use.  Also, I did this project over some time, so the first few images are actually showing the first setup I had with just a "plain jain" $25.00 SATA Port Multiplier.  When I tested with it I used Software Raid 5 and later determined that the CPU cost was two great and was degrading performance (avg 23M/sec on dd with Software Raid).

root@openmediavault:~# uptime
 01:16:08 up 43 days, 18:15,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05


root@openmediavault:/storage/Disk1# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; unlink test
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.3994 s, 36.5 MB/s
root@openmediavault:/storage/Disk1# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; unlink test
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 27.078 s, 39.7 MB/s
root@openmediavault:/storage/Disk1# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; unlink test
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.7574 s, 36.1 MB/s

Note: This again is DD and I am just trying to give you and idea of the average speed.  The read speed can be MUCH faster and goes up to ~100-120M/sec depending. However, on the A20 you usually end up limited by the fact you can only have the irq for the NIC attached to one CPU core which restricts max throughput on the NIC to 500Mbit (50M/sec). So really, you are going to be limited by the NIC before you a limited by the actual IO bottleneck.


Now the SYBA Raid card of course is a single point of failure, but in my experience if your going on the cheap, you are going to have to accept some type of limitation, whether its the raid card or even the board its self.  If you are really concerned with that, buy two of the A20s and 2 of the SYBA cards and hot swap them if the need arises.  Again, this is a storage server on the cheap not a $300 Synology NAS.


my 2 cents.


Cheers! 
 
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HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
oh man @TheLinuxBug.  


1. That's a pretty awesome setup.  I mean it's definitely cheap and it definitely seems fairly resourceful. 


2. I'm laughing my butt off on those pictures.  I mean they're awesome, they're cool, but seeing the small ARM board in a full sized case (especially one that I'm sure all of us are familiar with thanks to "Enterprise IT").  haha, seeing that small device in there in a full sized case...  LOL.


Yeah the primary reason I was considering an ARM device was due to the cheap hardware plus very lightweight power usage.  However, I think if I want to go all out like that, I'd rather spend an extra hundred or two and get a proper Intel Atom board and setup haha.  I've had too many "lowend" setups fail on me that I'd rather chip in a few extra to make sure I don't have to deal with it much again. 


But seriously, totally something I did not expect!  How's the performance on that setup?  I actually might do it out of sheer "ahh might as well!"  It looks like it's really delicate hardware wise and also software wise.  I mean how stable is it? 
 
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TheLinuxBug

New Member
@HalfEatenPie @drmike @KuJoe


I blame you all for my purchase of an Odroid-C2 this morning :D


I just couldn't resist, I sat choosing between the new Pi3 and the Odroid-C2 and figured I hadn't played with an Odroid product yet and wants to feel the power of the Quad core 2Ghz, so I bought one :X


@HalfEatenPie Not to be silly, but I was trying to document for you in my last reply the 'performance' which is why I provided the uptime, dd results, etc.   Is there some other spec you were wanting to know?  I have found it quite reliable, the only thing I ran into once during my testing, and I believe was mostly caused by just reimaging the SDcard a bunch, was one of my SDcards failed on me and I had to get another and restore the image from back-up.  With 16GB Class10 being so cheap I wasn't too upset, and of course this is a failure of the SDcard not the board or raid card.  Other than that the only reason its only 43 days is because I rebooted it for some reason or another :p


Cheers!
 
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HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Haha thanks for that by the way!  Yeah I was seeing OpenMediaVault so I was assuming it did some form of encoding (just like how Plex does encoding as well if you have it as such).  I was wondering if your system had that and if you felt there were any issues/limitations in the encoding. 


One of my biggest worry is that SD card actually.  I've heard (not too sure since I don't really do much of it) that the SD card has the highest chance of failure in the entire system (since it's not designed to be used for IO intensive work).  


I know it's a fairly difficult topic, but did you see a noticeable increase in your power bill/usage? 
 

TheLinuxBug

New Member
@HalfEatenPie


For me the server runs SAMBA and NFS and I actually attach it to another storage server I have which runs a minidlna instance to provide video content over UPNP/DLNA to my BananaPi which I use on an older 27" CRT in my office to watch videos on while I work.  I have a 32" LCD with a Pi 2 attached to it in my room also.  These little boards make great media centers :p  So the short answer is, I don't do any on the fly encoding or anything like that.  I don't really take full advantage of OpenMediaVault, I started out with it because there were easy directions for recompiling a kernel for that version of Bananaian to enable the Port Multiplier (The SYBA Raid card works without this as it basically looks like one device, but when I was working with just the 'plain jain' port multiplier for the A20 you have to change some code in the kernel to enable it).  SO really I stopped most of its built in services other than SAMBA and NFS as I mentioned as they weren't needed for my use case.


I run enough crap in this office that really I couldn't tell you about the power usage.  I really need to get my kill-a-watt back from a friend and test some but as of right now, couldn't tell you if there is any great significance. 


The SDCard in my case took such a big beating because I was testing different things and kept reflashing it.  If you have a worry about this, you can always simply boot off the SDcard and make your root volume on the raid or an attached hard drive so you don't use the SDcard for anything but booting.  In my case though I didn't see the failure as a huge suprise after my abuse of it, and I am sure if you did beat up the SDcard all the time it would be a point of failure, in my case though as most stuff that runs on it is memory resident and I don't run a lot of operations on / it hasn't been that big of an issue.  With 16Gb class10 being less than $10 each, just keep a diskimage gziped or use 7z and compress it down and save it for a rainy day.  Only takes about 8 minutes to image the card :p


Edit: Thought worth mentioning a short conversation I had with a friend re: power usage from the PSU.  In most cases  even though it is a 180Watt PSU, it should only use the wattage necessary to run the connected devices, so I would guess this is way way way under 180watts.  So if you consider it is running the A20, the SYBA Raid card and 5x3.5" hard drives, the biggest draw will be the drives as they are 12v.  You could reduce your footprint further by using 2.5" drives that are 5v for example. Even then it can't be a huge amount, has to be less than say a Celeron/Atom board in that case running those drives.


Cheers!
 
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KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
My RPi3 arrived today. Can't wait to mess around with it. Let's see if I can just drop my SD card from my RPi2 into it and but up and running.
 

TheLinuxBug

New Member
My RPi3 arrived today. Can't wait to mess around with it. Let's see if I can just drop my SD card from my RPi2 into it and but up and running.

I am a little bit jealous,  I'll admit, part of my reasoning for getting the Odroid is because the RaspberryPi 3 was on back order by the time I got around to it.  I was being a bit impatient.  However, I do still have plans to get one here, just not the initial batch I guess :p


Let us know how it goes, I will try to give some info on the Odroid C2 once it shows up as well.


Cheers!
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Coolio.  Yeah that was some of my concerns regarding it as well (the power mostly).  I don't know man, I find ARM to be like one of those really nitch devices.  Like they have a specific purpose and if you want to repurpose it for any other use then more than likely you'll have to do some wrestling to get it through. 


But man, I kinda want that pcDuino Nano now.  I looked at the prices the other day and their Series 3 is now like 50 dollars or something.  


Raspberry Pi 3 looks pretty awesome, but having a Raspberry Pi 2 right now and a Pine64+ with 2 GB RAM on the way, I don't think I'll be getting the Raspberry Pi 3 anytime soon.  It might be cool to take a look at the lower level Raspberry Pi Zero, but who knows?
 

TheLinuxBug

New Member
A little bit off topic, but so I don't have to make a new thread, my Odroid C2 arrived today!


@HalfEatenPie @willie @wlanboy


odroidc2.1.jpgodroidc2.2.jpgodroidc2.3.jpg


Thought I would share some pics :D


This thing is TINY compared to a Raspberry Pi 2 or even a Banana Pi, maybe 2/3 the size if that.  Used a mini Bic for reference.


P.S. My Raspberry Pi 3 Arrives Mar 16, 2016, will provide some pics again when it arrives!


Cheers!
 
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wlanboy

Content Contributer
This thing is TINY compared to a Raspberry Pi 2 or even a Banana Pi, maybe 2/3 the size if that.  Used a mini Bic for reference.


Cheers!

Thanks for sharing. Really nice build quality and a well made UART interface. 
Did you try the serial connection?
Not easy to find a 1.8V TTL adapter...
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
If I recall, Pi3 is supposed to use more power than Pi2.  


Awesome @TheLinuxBug!   I've always kept an eye on ODROIDs before.  I kinda want one personally, but I haven't found a good use for one yet so I've been holding off.  Also since I got a PINE 64+ with 2 GB coming, getting an ODROID on top of that sounds a bit repetitive in regards to hardware specs.  
 
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TheLinuxBug

New Member
Thanks for sharing. Really nice build quality and a well made UART interface. 
Did you try the serial connection?
Not easy to find a 1.8V TTL adapter...

I have not yet messed with the UART port, while I have an USB UART adapter it does weird things on my main dev machine which is sadly Windows where when I remove the adapter from the machine it causes a fun BSOD and the machine shits its self.  Been meaning to pull out my other laptop to use to test with just haven't had the time for it yet.  Even my play time this weekend was rather short lived :(


I do like the C2 but their Ubuntu image which I am using is a bit lacking.  I joined their IRC channel and was chatting a bit and it seems they haven't quite yet gotten the graphics drivers and such fully working in Ubuntu to the point where you can play back even high frame rate video.  I could play youtube in Chromium but only at 380p, anything above and it would just sit and glitch.  They say they are working on it and also expect a release of Kodi that works for it by April, but it sounds like if you want good video play back till then you have to stick with Android.


Will update as I get some time to play with it some more.


Cheers!
 
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HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Sounds like they're not having fun working on getting the graphics driver working properly. 


YOu know, I was thinking about also getting the touchscreen with one of my ARM devices, but I don't know what I'd actually do with it.
 

TheLinuxBug

New Member
Sounds like they're not having fun working on getting the graphics driver working properly. 


YOu know, I was thinking about also getting the touchscreen with one of my ARM devices, but I don't know what I'd actually do with it.

One of my ideas that is in the "Someday I would love to find the time to do this" pile is using a board with small touchscreen to mount in my truck and use for bluetooth autdio output from android and simple video playback, as well as possibly GPS (there are cheap USB GPS module you can get that will work for things like google maps).  I figure as I retire my old RPi B+ it may be nominated for that project.  Right now I use my cell phone for this, but it runs down the battery over time, would rather have the longer standby time.  I figure if I set this up I would wire it directly in with a fuse and a switch and boot it on start of vehicle.  Since I don't want to mess with the stereo bluetooth will be my audio option using one of those bluetooth to FM converts, or I have actually read somewhere you can make the Pi output FM on a few of its io pins (source needed). 


Anyhow, just a thought..


Cheers!
 
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