Chris Tyler's Blog

I'm trying to gauge interest in being able to buy the Raspberry Pi at the Seneca Bookstores (no promises!). Please take a second and let me know what you think using this poll...

The Raspberry Pi has a micro-USB jack for power input. This can be used with any recent mobile phone adapter. If you use a two-part adapter, with a plug-in AC-DC converter and a USB A to micro-USB A cable, it's easy to measure the current drawn by the Pi.

To do this, you'll need a USB A male to USB A female extension cord and an ammeter or multimeter with a 1A or 10A range.

1. Remove the outer insulation in the middle of the USB extension cable. Peel back the shielding (silver braid and/or foil)  to one side.

2. Cut the 5V supply wire (usually coloured red).

3. Connect your ammeter or multimeter to the cut 5V line.

4. Insert this cable between your AC-DC converter and the USB cable going to your Raspberry Pi.

So, how much current does the Raspberry Pi draw?

It looks like the Pi can draw anywhere from 250 to 500 mA in normal operation, though I did see smaller values in the early stages of startup. When idle, my Pi draws 320-380 mA; with a basic Logitech keyboard and mouse attached and in use, and with the CPU and GPU fairly active, it comes close to 500 mA.

Update: Powering the Pi from a Laptop

The fact that the Pi's current consumption is reliably under 500 mA means that it is actually safe to power from the USB port of another system. This is convenient for developers on the go: for example, I'm in an air-conditioned library escaping the current Toronto heatwave, and have my Pi connected to the back of my laptop with a micro-USB cable for power and a crossover ethernet cable for data.

On Tuesday, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) announced a number of grant awards at the Polytechnics 2012 conference, including the new Industrial Research Chairs for Colleges (IRCC) grants. I am honoured to be selected as the chairholder for the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Open Source Technology for Emerging Platforms in the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College.

This five-year renewable applied research grant enables me to continue and expand upon the work that I have been doing, along with a talented team of research assistants, with Fedora ARM and related projects. My goal is to bring the wealth of open source software currently available for x86 PCs and servers to emerging ARM based general-purpose computers. Although ARM architecture chips are the most popular CPUs made (more ARM chips shipped last year than there are people on this planet), most of these went into dedicated devices, and ARM chips are just starting to appear in general purpose computers. In order to make the transition to general-purpose ARM systems viable, industry-standard software stacks are needed. Fedora is a perfect fit for this purpose, because it encompasses both a large collection of cutting-edge open source software and a vibrant community, and it feeds many downstream distributions and projects.

My work in this new role will start with an expansion of existing work, including operating the Fedora ARM Koji buildsystem and improving the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, but I will additionally be focusing on Fedora on ARM server-class systems. In future phases, this will encompass working with the Fedora ARM project to promote ARM to primary architecture status, extending existing open source system management (and possibly virtualization/cloud management) frameworks to manage high-density ARM clusters, doing field trials of ARM-based data centre solutions, and bringing Fedora to the next generation of ARM technology.

Although the majority of my activity will shift from teaching to applied research, I will continue to teach the SBR600 Software Build and Release course in order to bring the research experience back into the classroom. I'll also continue to participate in the TeachingOpenSource.org initiative. As an Industrial Research Chair, I will also have a bit more of a public-facing role, representing CDOT and advocating the use of energy-efficient systems to local SMEs.

Many thanks to Red Hat for partnering with Seneca on this initiative, and I look forward to (continuing to!) work closely with Red Hat's incredible technical staff. I also thank the many companies and organization who wrote letters of support for the grant application, and look forward to collaboration and possible future partnerships with those organizations. And I particularly want to thank Seneca for its support of applied research, my colleagues at CDOT for their encouragement and for creating such an awesome environment to do applied research, and for the team that wrote the grant application under intense pressure and tight deadlines last November.

Watch this space for updates!

Element 14, the web presence of one of the Raspberry Pi distributors, Farnell,  operates a wonderful forum system. However, there is one significant problem with their system: under their terms of use, a person who is under 13 is prohibited from using the forum (and those between 13 and 18 from using it without their parent's explicit consent).

This understandable requirement, probably a result of US legislation (and perhaps legislation in other jurisdictions?), is at odds with the Raspberry Pi's stated focus on children (hence the "considered harmful" jab).

I'd encourage the Raspberry Pi community to use forum and wiki systems that don't exclude the device's target audience from participating! Perhaps Element 14 would consider a revision to their Terms of Use, or a dedicated forum with special rules that would enable children to participate. In the meantime, the Raspberry Pi Foundation's forums and the E-linux Wiki do not have age restrictions on participants.

Andrew Smith has released his Open Source Translation Database project, which contains thousands of open source translation files and can populate new translation files based on previous translations. In the released form this in incredibly useful -- and he has ambitious plans for new features and capabilities such as suggesting strings to be used in new projects based on the number of available translations.

Congratulations, Andrew, on this launch!

The Raspberry Pi hardware went on sale last night, and as with every other event related to the Pi, pandemonium ensued!

The educational, tech, and mainstream media is starting to take note. Here are some links to local coverage of the Pi and our work on the software for it:

• CBC.ca
• Toronto Star
• IT Business

• Radio Canada International - Masala Canada
• CBC News - Lang and O'Leary Exchange (segment starts at 47:05)

Update 2012-03-10 - additional links:

• MindShare Learning Report - March 2012

To clarify Seneca's involvement, because it may not be clear from the press coverage:

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation created the Raspberry Pi hardware, and has licensed its production to a pair of UK-based production and distribution companies, Farnell (which has wordwide subsidiaries including Newark here in Canada) and RS Components (Allied Electronics in Canada).
• The Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) within Seneca College works with the Fedora ARM group within the Fedora Project to produce a build of Fedora for ARM devices. One of our roles is the creation and operation of the build system, a cluster of more than 60 ARM-based computers used to build the ARM software.
• My research group at CDOT and my Software Build and Release (SBR600) classes at Seneca worked together to produce the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, which takes the Fedora ARM software and adds a small number of additional software packages needed for use on the Pi. We tested the remix on an alpha (pre-production) board provided by the Foundation.

Information about the Remix may be found on the Seneca CDOT wiki.