In the firtst quarter of 2012 some early ARM based android boards where released. I followed them with much interest but didn’t found it very suitable for human beings; without a touch screen an android OS needs a lot of tweaking to get a working envirooment in which you can easily install lots of software. The are some android boards available already; but the Raspberry is something different; It’s a ARM based linux device with roughly the same CPU & GPU power as the first Xbox.

I got my first one from a client and it had OpenElec & XBMC 12.0 on it. 697.95 BogoMips on ARMv6 rev 7 -> with a BCM2708 serie (the BCM2835) and 512MB RAM. The preinstalled XBMC works fine; it played most of the video content. Even most of my 1080p content did work out of the box.

Running debian

Downloaded from: here. I played around with it a little bit; and it’s a fast booting, easy installing complete OS; if you are used to “apt-get install”. I just did a dd to copy it to a flash card; Et voila; a booting debian OS.

When working with video on the Raspberry Pi running on Debian; You ‘ll run into some stuff. Lots of confusing info on the web: The CPU of RaspberryPi is quite low-end and it can’t really decode video at decent speed (even SD MPEG2). Hardware acceleration has to be used but by default only H264 can be hardware accelerated. You can buy a licence key to enable additional hardware decoders from RPi foundation (currently you can buy MPEG2 and VC-1 license). The graphics chip on RaspberryPi is very powerful and if video is encoded with a format supported by the hardware decoder, it can easily play HD content 1080p. But you will have to transcode all your material that is in different formats. Hardware decoding only works with dedicated video player (omxplayer). It is used by RaspBMC so if you plan on using this solution, you should have no problem. If you are planning on running your own distribution, you have to integrate omxplayer. Also bear in mind that omxplayer is quite a young project and while it’s quite stable, it’s not perfect (like most things on RPi dedicated software). Normal graphical environment (X server) does not use accelerated graphics. This is why you found some informations about slow GUI rendering. AFAIK XBMC is using OpenGL ES which does use hardware acceleration so it’s not a problem if you plan on using it. There are some problems with sound as it’s drivers are not good quality right now. You may hear some glitches in audio.

There are also problems with USB on Rpi, this wont let you use USB card to make audio problems go away. And since network chip is also connected using USB, there may be some glitches. Most of them are addressed right now in new versions of software but there may be some more. We some fiddling around it possible to get WIFI & or 3G working. Easy battery power is also available.

You can even install an app store with paid apps for the raspberry pi:

Or use it as an Super Nintendo Emulator :)

Some solutionz that can be expected and are within reach

Webcam server, Vehicle tracking (using an add-on GPS module), Streaming internet radio box, IPTV watcher, Airplay receiver, Vehicle Diagnostics, Baby monitor, Media server by adding a couple of USB hard drives, Media Center (XBMC), Video chat, Game emulator, running MAME (build your own arcade cabinet?), Network Attached Storage setup (NAS), Mini web server, FTP server, Proxy server, Firewall (Wireless, 2nd ethernet via USB or 3G router), Portable Media PC, Run an alarm system, Security webcam (with motion sensor), Control garden lighting, Control sprinkler system, Wearable computer, HTPC for TV web browsing, In car Computer, Thin client computer, Game server, IRC / chat server, build a cheap laptop, build a cheap tablet, create a digital photo frame, Asterisk, Home automation system, MP3 player, Wall hanging screen with voice control for network pictures, weather, news and RSS feeds, Cyber Cafe computer, Video conferencing system, Personal weather station / logger, Control a light display, Control an LED board, put it in an old mac classic or mac plus case as a general purpose computer, Ultra portable wardriving setup, A dedicated Synth, possibly with touch screen, Solar powered desktop computer, CNC controller, High tech birthday / Xmas presents, Backup server, RSS ticker, High tech alarm clock, Mini projector, DOSBox for games, Processing farm for SETI@Home, Cafe media player, Brains for Arduino setup, Mumble server, Industrial manufacturing controller, BitTorrent seedbox, Family notice board, Car black box with video, Robotic telescope / camera controller, Display photographer portfolio images, BitTorrent client, SMS gateway, Building your own printserver, creating a water drop