Raspberry Pi
We’ve been lucky enough to get a Raspberry Pi, which means that we can do some serious testing.
First impressions of the board are very positive. We’ve had it running continuously for just under three days, and while the ethernet PHY chip feels distinctly warm, the Broadcomm chip that’s at the heart of the Pi is as cool as cool can be.
The board is in my office, as I’ve been stuck indoors while recovering from flu, but the team have managed to log in remotely. The main job next week will be to prototype our interface board, testing it against the Pi, and working on a PCB layout that we can use for our alpha-test kits.
We’ll be blinking some LEDs, and checking some buttons, but we’ll be trying some more exciting experiments as well.
The new debian image
We’ve followed the advice on the Raspberry Pi website and are using the latest debian squeeze image. The image has proved very stable, though we haven’t had a chance to try out the new wifi support.
Given how quickly wifi has been added, we’re hoping that I2C support will come soon. While we don’t need it for the experimenter’s kit, we have quite a number of additional extension boards in the works, many of which use I2C.