Mar 01
We are excited about the new Raspberry Pi 3 that was just released. Its use of a more powerful ARM Cortex A53 processor, Wifi and Bluetooth will make it even easier to build systems. Some have been ordered already for coursework!
The processor even uses Big.LITTLE technology from ARM. This is now used on some phones/tablets as it means a lower power consumption overall. It does this by pairing each core with a smaller less power hungry core and using them when full performance is not needed.
Permanent link to this article: https://blog.soton.ac.uk/pi/2016/03/01/raspberry-pi-3-is-out/
Mar 29
Now there are four cores – and better ones – I felt the need to run our VIPS benchmarks to see how well the cores can work together. This is CPU-bound so is not affected by the micro-SD card speeds. Here are my results using vips-7.42.3:
Threads, time(s), speed-up
1, 92, 1
2, 48.2, 1.9 x
3, 32.5, 2.8 x
4, 23.2, 3.96 x
I ran them in console mode so there were no desktop threads running (although the little CPU meter is interesting if you do that – showing 25% 50% 75% 100% roughly as you increase the cores used.
Conclusion: the Pi2 is about a quarter of the speed of an old core-2 duo type core and certainly slower than the ARM A15 found in modern tablets/chromebooks. Parallel processing on the Pi does work well however with a 4 core speed-up of 3.96 times.
Kirk
Permanent link to this article: https://blog.soton.ac.uk/pi/2015/03/29/parallel-image-processing-test-on-the-new-raspberry-pi-2/
Nov 27
People soon need some wires – especially to plug into a little breadboard. These ones from ModMyPi are handy. For socket-socket these from Hobbytronics are also good.
Permanent link to this article: https://blog.soton.ac.uk/pi/2013/11/27/wires/
Nov 19
This is how I configured a Pi to use Eduroam. Note that this is quite old and may be site specific sorry!
in the WIFI Config ap Scan to find Eduroam
Edit its config and check you have:
WPA2-Enterprise (EAP)
Encryption: CCMP
EAP Method: TTLS
identity: yourID@soton.ac.uk
Password: your university password
CA certificate: /etc/ssl/certs/AddTrust_External_Root.pem
Inner auth: MSCHAPv2
Permanent link to this article: https://blog.soton.ac.uk/pi/2013/11/19/eduroam-wifi-on-the-rpi/
