The mounting holes alone make this new revision worth waiting for.
It's also nice to see the additional GPIO output which can be used either as an additional I2C bus or used for I2S (digital audio) output. The latter should be very useful for those who want to use the Raspberry Pi as a media center PC as it's trivial to convert I2S to S/PDIF or Toslink (optical).
Finally, I'm glad the GPIOs have been changed to expose the missing JTAG debug symbol. Having proper JTAG support makes low-level development far, far easier.
It's such a shame that the guys at Raspberry Pi can't communicate very well.
This is fantastic news, but where's the picture? the schematic?
There's a massive thread on the future Camera Module. Once a day or so, someone says "Can we have an update please?". The response: "In Development." Snooze.
"The SMSC 1V8 power has been disconnected from the system supply."
I notice they don't talk about this much at all, or give credit to the person who figured the issue out (who I believe may have been banned from the official forums for talking about it). It turns out that the high temperatures some people were seeing on the LAN9512 chip weren't actually normal at all; they'd screwed up and connected the output of its internal 1.8V regulator, which wasn't meant to drive external circuitry, to the 1.8V rail. So on some boards (depending on tolerances) its internal regulator ended up providing the 1.8V supply for the entire board and overheating quite a bit.
Do you have a source for this? Also is there something that owners of older boards can do (such as cutting the trace?) to make sure their boards don't overheat?
Unfortunately, unlike some of the other modifications in newer board revisions, there's no easy fix for this for owners of older boards. The level to which boards are affected varies and it's not clear how many (if any, for that matter) have stability problems as a result.
Doesn't help that most people don't actually seem to report when their board doesn't work properly, in part because the moderators on the official forums are quite hostile to anyone mentioning problems.
Sure! I am still experimenting and changing things around, but here is my current setup.
12v 10Ah sealed lead acid battery
Instapark 20w solar panel with solar charge controller
Pololu step down switching regulator
Logitech c270 webcam (USB)
Edimax wifi dongle (USB)
With this setup I am running 24/7 "off the grid." We'll see how well it works in the winter. The webcam and wifi can be directly connected to the RPi. You don't need a powered hub. This greatly simplifies things. The goal is to eventually swap out the SLA battery for a 12.8v LiFePO4 and house everything in a waterproof enclosure made from a Pelican case. I also have a powered hub and a GlobalSat GPS unit that I'd like to add at some point. The logitech camera is not that great. I'll look into replacing it once we know more about the add on camera coming from the Raspberry Pi foundation.
I'm guessing that whyenot dodged them due to a combination of luck and not having any USB peripherals connected other than the webcam and Wifi adapter; the more USB devices, the more likely you are to run into a problem.
I've connected the camera, wifi, gps and a usb hard disk to the pi at the same time using a powered USB hub (Belkin I think?) and haven't had any problems. This was with mains power. But you're right, there are many people who have run into problems. Either I was lucky or I didn't notice them.
I think connecting a keyboard and mouse as well may significantly increase the odds of it failing, which is unfortunate given how the Foundation advertised it.
I tried something similar using a 2700mAh LiPoly battery, a 3.4watt solar panel and a USB / Solar LiPoly charger, all purchased from Adafruit for a different project. It can power the Pi for about 4 hours, but you'd really want a much larger panel and battery. Also, I was very worried about the potential fire hazard from the LiPoly battery. I will eventually be setting up my camera in a state park, and I don't want to be responsible for starting a brush fire.
I did, after rather a long wait (I ordered in early May, and it came in early July). After the excitement wore off I installed OpenELEC and it now sits in my front room, working pretty damn well as a media centre.
I ordered mine the day after it went on sale. Two months ago I got am email saying it was being shipped out and should be here within 12 weeks. Last week I got an email saying it was delayed another 8 weeks. This really depresses me that they're talking about Rev1 production coming to an end and Rev2 production ramping up when they can't even fulfill their existing orders.
Should have ordered from element14 -- 4 day delivery time for me. I also heard that mcm electronics is pretty fast too. You should be blaming the distributors, not RPi. There are many distributors, so choose one that doesn't suck.
I'm not blaming RPi except in the capacity of control over their distributors. I'm disappointed in the response, and disappointed in the demand rapidly outpacing the supply. I understand the engineers do what the engineers do, but other complaints about RPi hold as well: they're not good at communication, they're only really transparent on spotty occurrences, and it's been six months since they launched and they're still having a hard time producing the units being demanded. What I was hoping for from this new revision was a chip that wasn't sold out. The email notifying me of the delay said their CPU was sold out so new boards could not be made. Shame on RS for telling me I had a unit coming to me when that unit apparently hadn't actually been produced yet.
As for the other distributors, some people apparently got great service from RS as well. My frustration is with the entire operation, top to bottom. It's hard to call this a success, and there's no indication it's going to get better. I have to wonder how they're going to supply the educational market if this is how they handle the hacker market they need so badly.
I know this sounds like a hit-job on my part, but you have to realize this is incredibly frustrating, and the news I'm hearing from people who received them is that the users aren't really interested in units to begin with (see below, "I never turned mine on").
I too ordered from RS... and I too was told about the delay, which makes me sad/angry because I had a friend order from Allied Electronics and they got their board within 4 weeks of ordering.
I tried contacting RS to see if I could cancel my order so I could place one at Allied Electronics and they told me they couldn't cancel the order, and payment had already gone through... I am thinking of contacting my credit card company, but I have in the past and will want to continue doing business with RS for other electronic parts purchases... I already had an account set up with them which made it so easy to pull the trigger.
Seeing people that have never turned theirs on makes me sad, mainly because I think it is a fantastic unit to play with, and I have some ideas of things I would like to do with the unit. If all of those people could have waited until later when supply was greater then those of us that are actually interested and actually want to do things with it would have had the chance to purchase one and have it shipped.
Good God! who did you order from? I placed an order with RS in May and got it about a month later. 20 weeks is simply unreasonable. I'd cancel and look at another fulfillment company.
I ordered from RS. At this point, I don't even care anymore. I won't be doing business with them again, and I likely won't ever order another RPi. I was terribly excited for it, but it's been so long since I put down the commitment that the thrill is gone. My cousin ordered a couple weeks after I did and he got his in June. I've just doubled down on Arduino instead.
This is normal for RS. Back in 95 when I was doing EE, we ordered 2000 low dropout regulators for a production run from RS.
I left the company in 1998.
In 1999 I got a call from one of my colleagues and they'd received them...
Needless to say their invoice and stock was returned.
I ordered mine from RS on July 2nd... looking at their shipping tables that they have now posted my order number is not going to ship till mid-November..
This has saddened me greatly and has made me angry. My friend ordered from Allied Electronics and got his within a month.
I had ordered mine from Element 14 during july and was told it'd take until november until i got it, ended up shipping just before august. they are certainly fun to play with i got two, one to really play play with and the other to use as a print server for a 3d printer.
This is really a shame. Another commenter says the same and apparently it turned him off to the RPi in general.
I don't know why RS drops the ball on some orders; hopefully as demand increases another supplier will start offering them for those of us who dislike RS.
You have two you've never used, while I have 20 week shipping delays for one unit ordered six months ago, and a heap of schematics and already-wired modules to plug into the GPIO sitting uselessly, and a head full of further designs yet.
Goodness. I need to go for a walk. This thread is threatening to get the best of me.
I feel bad for you. Where are you located? If it is in the continental US I'll send you mine. I installed debian on it and did nothing else due to other commitments. I really don't know when I'll have chance to start playing with it.
I couldn't ask you to send me your RPi. I've put all that stuff in a box under my workbench and moved on to new Arduino projects. Someday maybe my RPi will show up out of the blue and will be a nice surprise and I can pull that stuff back out, but if I got it tomorrow it would likely end up like yours. I've just moved on for now.
It's also nice to see the additional GPIO output which can be used either as an additional I2C bus or used for I2S (digital audio) output. The latter should be very useful for those who want to use the Raspberry Pi as a media center PC as it's trivial to convert I2S to S/PDIF or Toslink (optical).
Finally, I'm glad the GPIOs have been changed to expose the missing JTAG debug symbol. Having proper JTAG support makes low-level development far, far easier.