We’ll be talking more later this week about the New Out Of the Box System (NOOBS) which Eben discusses towards the end of this video. We have a suspicion you’ll like it.
Maker Faire Google Hangout with Eben
via Raspberry Pi
Tag Archives: Uncategorized
New in the Swag Shop: recycled CD case pencils!
via Raspberry Pi
These feel lovely when you sharpen them, have a beauteous Raspberry Pi logo at the end, and are made in solid colours from recycled CD cases. Buy some, look funky when you doodle, help fund computing education, and save the planet too – what could be better?
Amazingly, we have not yet sold out of our first batch of Babbage the Bear. (He has stayed on the shelves longer than the camera boards, which we find shocking and remarkable.) Get him while he’s snuggly!
Raspberry Pi for Dummies: sample chapter
via Raspberry Pi
If you’re wondering about introducing your kids to Scratch, but aren’t quite sure where to start, here’s a handy resource for you. Sean McManus, one of the authors of Raspberry Pi for Dummies, has sent me a link to a couple of sample chapters of the book, including the first chapter on Scratch. You’re welcome to download it to find out whether the book’s for you.
Raspberry Pi For Dummies PDF Sampler
Frederik and Ernest’s Europe – Middle East – Africa roadtrip
via Raspberry Pi
Frederik and Ernest Lotter from Blue Horizon Embedded Systems in South Africa are driving from the UK to South Africa via Russia and the Middle East, taking in seventeen countries on their way.
They are making the journey in a Land Rover Defender which is fitted with a Raspberry Pi-based distributed light control system. The Raspberry Pi, and their lighting rig design, will be put to the test over 22000km of harsh conditions and rough terrain.
The Lotter brothers are experienced electronic engineers and are offering to meet up with groups of potential Raspberry Pi or ARM enthusiasts along the way. There may even be a Pi-themed reward available if you can find them using the live GPS tracking system they have installed.
You can track them live online, and if you want them to come and talk to your school, business or another group about Raspberry Pi and ARM processors while they’re in your country, they’re inviting you to email them - please get in touch as soon as possible if you’d like them to visit. Watch the video to learn more, and to find out what their route looks like. Thanks Fred and Ernest; we’re looking forward to tracking your progress!
Welcome to the Swag Shop!
via Raspberry Pi
You may have noticed that a little while ago, we quietly withdrew Raspberry Pi branded t-shirts from sale. Since then, we’ve been working on a reboot of the store. Shirts have been totally redesigned, and are now screen-printed rather than transfer-printed, which gives a much higher-quality and tougher finish; we’ve also listened to your requests for more colours and thicker material. [Edit to add: a few of you have asked about the larger sizes. At the moment they're available in black (up to 3XL), and chocolate (Eben's favourite), red and sport grey (2XL). We'll add more if the demand's there, so please let us know what you want.]
Every purchase you make goes to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational activities, so you’re not just making yourself look swanky; you’re directly helping kids.
T-shirts, just calling out for you to buy them so they can escape their cruel imprisonment in plastic crates.
So today we’re relaunching the shop, under a new name, with new management (things are being run by our friends at Pimoroni), and new goodies for you to buy.
Babbage the bear needs a home.
Shirts (for ladies, men and kids) aren’t the only thing we’ve got in stock: you can now buy your very own Babbage the bear, and we also have Raspberry Pi mugs, bags, and travelcard holders for you to sip from, carry things in, and wave at turnstiles proudly.
A holder for your Oyster card (or your library card, bus pass or ID). Thanks to TfL for allowing us to mess with their map, and to Paul Beech for the design.
A tough drawstring bag for your hacking tools, about twelve Babbages or your overnight gear.
It’s a mug. You put coffee in it.
We’ll be introducing more goodies to the store as time goes on, and announcing them here when we do. We hope you like it! Please get buying – every penny of profit we make goes straight back into the Raspberry Pi Foundation, where it’s used directly to help educate kids in computer science.
Camera board project: time lapse video
via Raspberry Pi
Our friends at DesignSpark have produced a really beautiful time-lapse video with one of our new camera boards. It doesn’t start very beautifully, because it was filmed on a day whose start can best be described as “sodden”, but by afternoon the clouds parted and England started to look exceptionally green and pleasant. If you want to skip the rain, fast-forward to 1m46. (There’s a guest appearance from a double rainbow later on, too.)
You can find detailed instructions on how to make your own time-lapse video with your own camera board over at DesignSpark. Big thanks to Andrew Back for the vid and the tutorial!
Camera board available for sale!
via Raspberry Pi
The camera boards are now available for order! You can buy one from RS Components or from Premier Farnell/Element14. We’ve been very grateful for your patience as we’ve tweaked and refined things; it’d have been good to get the camera board out to you last month, but we wanted your experience to be as good as possible, and we’ve been working on the software right up until last night. Thank you to Gordon and Rob at Raspberry Pi and to Dom Cobley for their work on the firmware (Rob also worked on the documentation); to JamesH for his work on the software; to the Broadcom Cambridge ISP team, particularly David Plowman and Naush Patuck, for volunteering to help with tuning; to Bruce Gentles at Broadcom for his volunteering to help with some of the initial bring-up; to James Adams at Raspberry Pi for running the hardware project, and everybody at Sony Pencoed for making it happen.
Tehzeeb Gunza at OmniVision coordinated things from their end, and helped us with sensor selection. Thanks also to Gert van Loo and Rob Gwynne for their work on the hardware design. (And thank you to Broadcom for letting us take advantage of your team’s willingness to volunteer for us!) This, for the curious, is the camera lab we’ve been borrowing from Broadcom for testing. The mannequin’s name is Veronica. She’s lousy company. The room gives us a calibrated and fixed target to use during tuning; it’s designed to be filled with examples of the sorts of things people tend to take pictures of. Which makes it a kind of creepy place to hang out. Between this and anechoic chambers, we’re getting the full range of testing chambers that give us the shivers.
Click to enlarge. You might be interested to learn that this was snapped with a Nokia N8, which uses an earlier version of the imaging core that’s in the Raspberry Pi (but a different sensor and optics).
For such a small device, this has been an enormous project, and a year-long effort for everybody involved. We’re pretty proud of it: we hope you like it!
How to set up the camera hardware
Please note that the camera can be damaged by static electricity. Before removing the camera from its grey anti-static bag, please make sure you have discharged yourself by touching an earthed object (e.g. a radiator or water tap).
The flex cable inserts into the connector situated between the Ethernet and HDMI ports, with the silver connectors facing the HDMI port. The flex cable connector should be opened by pulling the tabs on the top of the connector upwards then towards the Ethernet port. The flex cable should be inserted firmly into the connector, with care taken not to bend the flex at too acute an angle. The top part of the connector should then be pushed towards the HDMI connector and down, while the flex cable is held in place. (Please view the video above to watch the cable being inserted.)
The camera may come with a small piece of translucent blue plastic film covering the lens. This is only present to protect the lens while it is being mailed to you, and needs to be removed by gently peeling it off.
How to enable camera support in Raspbian
Boot up the Pi and log in. The default username is pi, and the default password is raspberry. (Note: if you have changed these from the default then you will need to supply your own user/password details).
Run the following commands in a terminal to upgrade the Raspberry Pi firmware to the latest version:
sudo apt-get update
Click to enlarge
sudo apt-get upgrade
Click to enlarge
Access the configuration settings for the Pi by running the following command:
sudo raspi-config
Navigate to “camera” and select “enable”.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Select “Finish” and reboot.
Click to enlarge
How to use the Raspberry Pi camera software
raspivid is a command line application that allows you to capture video with the camera module, while the application raspistill allows you to capture images.
-o or –output specifies the output filename and -t or –timeout specifies the amount of time that the preview will be displayed in milliseconds. Note that this set to 5s by default and that raspistill will capture the final frame of the preview period.
-d or –demo runs the demo mode that will cycle through the various image effects that are available.
Example commands
Capture an image in jpeg format:
raspistill -o image.jpg
Capture a 5s video in h264 format:
raspivid -o video.h264
Capture a 10s video:
raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000
Capture a 10s video in demo mode:
raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000 -d
To see a list of possible options for running raspivid or raspistill, you can run:
raspivid | less
raspistill | less
Use the arrow keys to scroll and type q to exit.
Extended documentation is available.
Note that we recommend that you change SSH password if you are using a camera, in order to prevent unwanted access.
How to stream video from the Raspberry Pi camera over a network
To view the feed on Linux
Install the dependencies by running the following in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install mplayer netcat
Find your IP address by running ifconfig. (Your IP address will be listed in the console output and will probably be of the form 192.168.1.XXX).
Run the following command in a terminal to view the feed using MPlayer:
nc -l -p 5001 | mplayer -fps 31 -cache 1024 -
To view the feed on Windows
Install and run Linux instead.
Find your IP address by running ipconfig. (Your IP address will be listed in the console output and will probably be of the form 192.168.1.XXX).
Note that your browser may complain that these files are malicious, as they are unsigned executables.
Press the Windows key and the ‘r’ key simultaneously to bring up the “Run” dialog. Enter cmd.exe into the dialog and press enter/return to open a DOS prompt.
Enter the following command at the prompt to view the feed using MPlayer:
[Path to nc.exe]\nc.exe -L -p 5001 | [Path to mplayer.exe]\mplayer.exe -fps 31 -cache 1024 -
To view the feed on OS X
Download MPlayer.
Alternatively, you can download mplayer using Brew, which we recommend.
Find your IP address by running ifconfig. (Your IP address will be listed in the console output and will probably be of the form 192.168.1.XXX).
Run the following command in Terminal to view the feed using MPlayer:
nc -l -p 5001 | mplayer -fps 31 -cache 1024 -
To view the feed on a Raspberry Pi:
Find your IP address by running ifconfig. (Your IP address will be listed in the console output and will probably be of the form 192.168.1.XXX).
Run the following commands in a terminal on the receiving Pi:
mkfifo buffer
nc -p 5001 -l > buffer | /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/hello_video.bin buffer
To transmit the feed from the Pi with camera module attached
After setting up the “receiving” machine as per the instructions above, run the following commands in a terminal on the “transmitting” Pi:
raspivid -t 999999 -o – | nc [insert the IP address of the client] 5001
You can then use the commands listed in the “How to use the Raspberry Pi camera software” section above to change the capture time or to add a video effect.
How to submit bug reports or see the source code
You can see the source code and submit bug reports for raspivid and raspicam here.
Guest post from Mythic Beasts: how we dealt with those DDoS attacks
via Raspberry Pi
Do you remember the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks this website was undergoing a few months ago? They made the news (partly because it was just so bizarre to see someone attacking an educational computing charity) – if you want to refresh your memory, see this, this, or this.
Pete Stevens, who runs marathons and our hosting company, Mythic Beasts, thought you’d be interested in what he’s been doing to try to ensure this can’t happen again. (Famous last words, Pete.) Here’s what he did. Over to Pete!
–
In the past we’ve had occasional trouble with denial of service attacks against the Raspberry Pi website. In particular, simply overflowing us with traffic has proved not that difficult – the server only has a 1Gbps uplink. When your admin (me) cocks up, it turns out you can saturate a core calculating syncookies leaving the other cores idle because he should have configured IRQ balancing properly.
Pete, pounding the pavement. Click the image for what is possibly the funniest local news story to come out of Cambridge in the last decade.
We briefly investigated cloud based DDoS protection which we still hold in reserve, but it has a habit of declaring that Liz can’t post things because apparently she’s a spambot. We also had to switch off IPv6 access to the website to use them, which, for an educational project, was unfortunate as there is going to eventually be a large network transition to IPv6 and allowing people to learn about it and use it is desirable.
So we’ve scaled out the hosting infrastructure out to a distributed cluster of machines. We’ve installed four additional little dual core machines, two in our Telecity Sovereign House site, two in our Telecity Harbour Exchange site. Each of these runs a load balancer and forwards connections back to the main webserver. This means the inbound load is now shared over 4 separate 1Gbps links and there’s rather more CPU available to calculate syncookies when required and rather more bandwidth to saturate.
We load balance over the load balancers using DNS round robin, as you can see from our public DNS.
$ dig www.raspberrypi.org AAAA +short
lb.raspberrypi.org.
2a00:1098:0:80:1000:13:0:5
2a00:1098:0:80:1000:13:0:6
2a00:1098:0:82:1000:13:0:5
2a00:1098:0:82:1000:13:0:6
$ dig www.raspberrypi.org A +short
lb.raspberrypi.org.
93.93.130.39
93.93.130.214
93.93.128.211
93.93.128.230
Now, everybody knows that this is a stupid way of load balancing, and you don’t get anything like even usage across your sites. This isn’t even slightly born out by the bandwidth figures for the last few days:
93.93.128.211 347.04 GB
93.93.128.230 341.61 GB
93.93.130.39 349.58 GB
93.93.130.214 347.88 GB
That’s agreement to within 2%, which is a pretty even split. So much for commonly held wisdom, we prefer science.
We’ve set the entire internal network up with IPv6. So when you connect to one of the front end machines, it’ll connect back to the main webserver over IPv6. One of the reasons for this is so we’re now running mission critical services over IPv6 – a move to IPv6 worldwide is happening at a glacial pace, and we want to make sure that our support works well. Having an angry Liz phone you up if it doesn’t is a very effective motivator.
You may have seen odd forum and comment issue while we were setting this up. One of the forum spam filters allowed filtering people based on source IP address. The move to the new setup means that clicking the filter by IP address feature resulted in dropping all new comments from that load balancer – a quarter of our traffic. *Oops*. We had to fix that to read the forwarded-by headers.
Now of course the real question is, why aren’t we fronting the site with a massive cluster of Pis? Testing with hping3 suggests that a Pi starts to struggle at around 2500 syns/sec. The front-ends we have are absolutely fine at at 50,000 syncs/sec (reading roughly 10% cpu), so with four of them we can probably handle around 1,000,000+ syns/second. That’d require 400 Pis to keep up, so it’d be a very very large cluster of Pis, not to mention 5 switches in each site.
Of course a very stern warning has been given out to people who have access to the front end machines – not only can they receive a million syns/sec, they can also send them, and that could seriously upset other internet users if it was directed at them.
Now, a side effect of this scale-out is we’re left with a bunch of machines that have a reasonable amount of excess CPU. Eben has *strong views* about wasting CPU cycles, it makes him very sad. So we’ve put them to use.
Rob Bishop and Gordon Hollingworth at Raspberry Pi spend quite a lot of time building software. Compiling it is time-consuming, and their laptops get hot and make fan noises. So we’ve installed a set of dual core VMs on the five core servers running under KVM. When everything is fully operational the software team can kick off a build from the master VM which will then use distcc to farm out the compile across all five machines. This means there’s effectively 10 cores available most of the time for building software. When the website gets busy, the lower priority VMs slow down and hand the cycles back to the load balancer/Apache/PHP/MySQL.
Now, the Raspberry Pi is an educational project. It’s not just about educating children: adults still need to learn things, and that includes me. We’ve run many dual stack IPv4/IPv6 machines before, but we thought we’d try IPv6 only machines and discover the difficulties in order to improve our support for IPv6. So the distcc VMs are IPv6 only – they can’t access anything on the internet that isn’t accessible over IPv6. In reality this means they can see Google, Facebook, lots of mirror servers and a small fraction of other sites.
In the process of setting this up I discovered that I was unable to get the Debian Squeeze network installer to install from an IPv6 only network, so I had to do the initial install to the VMs from a full install image rather than the cut down one. I then realised that Mythic Beasts still doesn’t have an IPv6 aware resolver yet, which we need to sort out, so I had to use Googles public resolver. This is still on my todo list along with full DNSSEC resolver support.
Happily Debian appears to work fine with IPv6 only. The mirrors are v6 enabled, so the VMs recieve updates and can install packages fine, and so far it appears to be going well.
There’s still some things to do and questions to answer: should we move apache/php processing to the front end nodes? Will WordPress Supercache and the other plugins cope in a distributed environment? Will file uploads still work? Can we solve that with NFS? Does NFS even work over IPv6? Should we install a varnish cache on the front end nodes and disable WordPress Supercache? Should we do both? Will it confuse people if we have two layers of caching that expire at different times? Is that better than what we have now? Instead of having tcp-syn cookies on the whole time we could only enable them when under attack. Have we made a dreadful mistake with the build VMS, and is it all going to go offline when Rob tries to compile OpenOffice? Should we stop worrying about all of these questions and instead work out whose job it is to buy the first round at the Cambridge beer festival?
If this is the sort of thing you’d find interesting, and you would like to be paid to solve exactly these sorts of questions, Mythic Beasts is recruiting.
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/cgi-bin/job.pl
We’re looking for both junior and senior people, we very strongly like bright motivated people who get things done, and we’re not overly impressed by certifications. We’d really like a full time person or two but are not averse to taking on summer or gap year students providing they’re smart and they get things done.
Homemade GPS receiver
via Raspberry Pi
A slightly abbreviated post today – we’ve just driven 380 miles to Phoenix from LA for Intel ISEF, where Eben’s talking tomorrow, and we’re ready to drop. But I was mailed this amazing piece of work this morning, and it really deserves your attention.
Andrew Holme is a member of the Systems Group at Broadcom Cambridge. He’s friends with several of Raspberry Pi’s engineers, and he’s been working on a homemade GPS receiver in the evenings for the last few years. Recently, he’s added a Pi to create a truly portable, battery-powered receiver.
It’s a remarkable piece of work. It shouldn’t be possible to build a GPS receiver like this out off-the-shelf parts. There is no custom silicon in this build; it’s all very, very clever use of an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) to implement the digital logic sections of the pipeline. My electronics isn’t good enough to really understand much of what’s going on here: all I can really tell you is that there’s an analogue front end and 1-bit ADC (analogue to digital converter) followed by all kinds of mad-clever digital stuff. So I’m not going to summarise what Andrew has done, but fortunately for us all he’s written the project up in incredible detail, so you can have a poke around yourself. Please do visit the link; this is one of the most impressive projects we’ve ever seen attempted with the Pi.
A bit of housekeeping: please be aware that posts this week will be a bit (or, as today, a lot) later in the day that you’re used to, because I’m several thousand miles further to the left than normal. There also won’t be quite as much Twitter activity from us as usual while we’re travelling, but the official Facebook and G+ pages will be forging ahead as normal. (Thanks Lorna!)
Guest post from DesignSpark: Oxford Raspberry Jam
via Raspberry Pi
Here’s a guest post from our friend Pete Wood at RS Component’s community arm, DesignSpark. Pete is one of the organisers of the Oxford Raspberry Jams. This post was first published at www.designspark.com.
Raspberry Jams are now being held all over the world; I’ve been trying to go to about one a month, and am lucky enough to be in Tokyo for some press and meetings while the Tokyo Jam is on later this month. There’s a list of events in each month’s MagPi, and if you’re looking for something near you, it’s worth checking the events page on our forums. If you can’t find a Jam near your home, why not look into setting one up? There’s information on how to get started at the Raspberry Jam website, which Alan O’Donohoe tells me will be getting a redesign in the coming months.
Over to Pete!
This month’s Jam held at DesignSpark HQ in Oxford UK was our biggest turnout yet, with over 30 Pi Geeks crammed into the room!
Raspberry Pi Camera
I kicked off the event by showing the new Raspberry Pi camera module, which will be available from RS Components later in May. In the picture is a pre-production module, the production version is a couple of millimetres taller. The camera gives stunning HD video from a 5MP sensor at 30 FPS.
Digital Signage
Next up was one of my RS colleagues, Pete Milne, who showed us his Digital Signage application. Pete has connected up a network of Raspberry Pis to flat screen TVs here at the RS Oxford Offices and at our main facility in Corby, Northamptonshire. The Pis run a libreoffice slideshow in a continuous loop and display Health and Safety messages for RS employees. He’s been running these continuously for over 8 weeks without having to re-boot, so it’s very robust. The Pis runs without a keyboard or mouse and the content can be updated remotely over the network.
If you want to create your own Digital Signage Application, Pete has shared how to do it on GitHub. Just follow the INSTALL file for setup details.
Wii Controller Car
Oxford Raspberry Jam regular Alex Eames presented another cool little project using a Wii controller and Nunchuck. This one was for controlling a remote control car that has an on-board Raspberry Pi with Bluetooth dongle. It also allows the control of brake lights, headlights and indicators and also drives an aircraft propeller. Alex plans to build all this into the car itself, which would need to accommodate the Pi, the electronics hanging of the GPIO, some model aircraft batteries and the motor and fan. Alex, I think you need a bigger car… how about a Monster Truck?
You can read more about Alex’s project on his blog.
Giant Video Wall
Our next demo was one that has been featured on the Raspberry Pi site a few weeks ago for a Raspberry Pi powered video wall. Alex and Colin from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) have built this system in C and some Python Code. It has clever features like bezel compensation to accommodate different styles of screens. They showed a 4 screen setup, but have also run a 9+4 configuration. The software is scalable to any size or shape. Each screen needs a Pi, and one separate Pi is used as the master. This is a classic example showing that you can build your own video wall for a fraction of the price of a commercial solution that would certainly cost a lot more! Chaps, I can see a business opportunity here for screening big screen sporting events on a budget down my local pub. ;0) They expect to licence the software/design at some point. More details are available on their website.
Motion Detected Camera
Another Oxford Jam regular, Dave R, showed his Pi with a webcam motion detection system and linked to a DSLR. Dave created this for his bird table, to capture pictures of birds when they land on the table, I think I need to build a similar solution to stop my kids from stealing my Haribos…
Touch Screen Display
Paul had two projects to show. The first was a simple touch screen for the Pi to allow control and display. Paul was reading and displaying temperatures. The screens are semi-intelligent, storing screen images and having a sound output available. The screen images are loaded via a Windows app and USB connection. The Pi can then control the display of those images.
Sky Remote Controlled LED Lighting
The second demonstration was a programmable LED strip and infrared receiver, controlled by a Sky TV remote control. A simple Python script reads the codes from a remote control. He could the use this to flash the LEDs in various patterns and colours. The LEDs are driven by SPI and can be daisychained up to 1024 LEDs.
ChiPhone
Paul M and Annierei L, showed us their ChiPhone box. ChiPi is an Electronic messaging system for children allowing them to send and receive voice messages. They have designed a child friendly box with large buttons and microphone. With simple record and ‘To/play’ buttons it makes for an easy messaging system connected to the internet via WiFi. You can find out more about their project on their website.
Pi Keyword Cruncher
Pi Jam regular and Data Geek John finished off our live demos by showing us his Pi based RSS feed collector and keyword analysis tool. The Pi collects data from various RSS feeds every 30 minutes and stores the results in a MySQL database. The data is then used to monitor trends in keywords, which over time show either peaks of activity or trends of ‘chatter’ about specific topics. The advantage of John using his Raspberry Pi Instead of his 50W laptop, is that it the Pi only takes 2W and can be left on all the time. It also frees up his laptop to do other tasks.
RaspBMC Toddler In-Car Entertainment System
The final presentation of the evening from one of my Jam co-hosts Alex Gibson, who in true Hollywood awards winners style couldn’t attend in person so sent a video message! Alex’s video featured his project for a Pi based RaspBMC In-Car Toddler entertainment system. One of the most impressive bits was a headrest bracket he had printed out on his Raspberry Pi-based 3D printer.
Thanks to all those who showed their projects. Looking forward to the next event!
We have loads more excellent Raspberry Pi content on DesignSpark, check out our Raspberry Pi Design Centre.
Techradar compares five Raspberry Pi operating systems
via Raspberry Pi
There’s a really fantastic piece in Techradar and Linux Format, going into considerable depth to compare, contrast and review five Raspberry Pi operating systems. If you’ve been thinking about trying out a new distro on your Pi, it’s a great place to start. (And well done, Raspbian!)
PyPy on Pi
via Raspberry Pi
While we love all programming languages equally here at the Foundation, we do love Python an awful lot. Most users run their code under the “default” CPython interpreter, but over the last few years the PyPy project has made great strides in producing an highly compatible alternative interpreter with an integrated tracing JIT compiler. On x86 platforms this can improve the performance of some workloads by a factor of ten or more, and the PyPy team are now bringing the same sort of boost to the ARM world.
You can download an Pi-compatible alpha release of PyPy for ARM and see some benchmarks here. We’re proud to have been able to contribute a small amount of funding to the latter stages of this project; over the next few weeks we’ll be running an irregular series highlighting some of the other open source projects that we’ve been contributing to.
Up next for the Open Compute Project: The Network
via Open Compute Project
By Frank Frankovsky - Chairman/President, Open Compute Project
A little more than a month ago, the Open Compute Project celebrated its two-year anniversary. When Facebook first launched the project, it was our hope that we could spark more conversation and more collaboration around the development of efficient data center technologies. The OCP community has since grown to 50+ official members and thousands of participants; we’ve launched a foundation to guide the project; and we’ve started to advance open designs for everything from racks and storage boxes to motherboards and interconnects.
This is amazing progress in such a short span. But something’s missing. We are working together, in the open, to design and build smarter, more scalable, more efficient data center technologies — but we’re still connecting them to the outside world using black-box switches that haven’t been designed for deployment at scale and don’t allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them.
With that in mind, we are today announcing a new project within OCP that will focus on developing a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch. Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook, has volunteered to lead the project, and a wide variety of organizations — including Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Facebook, Intel, Netronome, OpenDaylight, the Open Networking Foundation, and VMware — are already planning to participate. Work on the project will begin in earnest at the first-ever OCP Engineering Summit, being held at MIT on May 16.
It’s our hope that an open, disaggregated switch will enable a faster pace of innovation in the development of networking hardware; help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish; and ultimately provide consumers of these technologies with the freedom they need to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and efficient across the entire stack. This is a new kind of undertaking for OCP — starting a project with just an idea and a clean sheet of paper, instead of building on an existing design that’s been contributed to the foundation — and we are excited to see how the project group delivers on our collective vision.
At the last Open Compute Summit, we talked about the importance of disaggregation, of separating the components of these technologies from each other so we can build systems that truly fit the workloads they run and update those components independently of each other, on an as-needed basis. But the promise of disaggregation — a promise that’s been made since the days of the mainframe — can truly be delivered on only if we work together, in the open, to establish common standards that everyone can adopt and build upon, from the bottom of the hardware stack to the top. And with the addition of this new project, the OCP community now has an opportunity to do exactly that.
Troubleshooting: so easy a ten-year-old can do it
via Raspberry Pi
The ten-year-old in question is Jessica, Gordon’s daughter, who dropped into the office last week to give us a hand testing some Raspberry Pis that customers had sent back to the manufacturers as “faulty”. Whenever this happens, the Pis are passed on to us or to the Sony factory in Wales where the Pis are built, and we test them to find out what’s going on and to ensure that there isn’t a bug in manufacturing.
At the moment, we see returns in the order of about 0.02% of all units (the ones Jessica is working on are on the right of her desk). The factory processes are always being refined, and we hope to see this number come down even further as all of our production transitions to the UK. As usually happens when we troubleshoot returns, though, we found that around half of Jessica’s Pis weren’t faulty at all. We can’t emphasise this enough: before you decide you’ve got a broken unit, check out the troubleshooting forum and the wiki. If your Pi doesn’t work, the first check you should make is that the power supply you’re using is a branded, reliable 5v supply. Many no-name supplies (especially in the US, for some reason) do not actually provide the voltage that they claim to, and that’s been causing all kinds of problems.
Jessica finds another working Pi. Later, we’re sending her up that ladder to clean out the asbestos tube.
You should also ensure that you’re running the latest version of Raspbian. (Lorna just mailed me this morning with another handful of emails from a group of people swearing blind their Pis are broken. They weren’t. The people in question were using SD cards with an out-of-date image that they’d bought from a third-party vendor, that didn’t work with the newer chipset on their Raspberry Pis.) If you aren’t sure about your SD card image, see this post from March. Pre-flashed cards from third party dealers on Amazon or eBay are a bit of crapshoot, and they’re something we can’t police; if you need one, get your pre-flashed card from one the companies we licence to sell the Pi itself. (See the top right of the page.) Several of Jessica’s test cases had been sent back to Farnell and RS because of this issue, and while that’s great for Jessica, it’s really frustrating for the customer who ends up without a Pi for a week and who will probably find their next Pi has the same problem, because they’re using the same card. (I am aware of one person who sent SIX Raspberry Pis back to Farnell one after the other, insisting that they were all broken, that we/Farnell were charlatans, etc. etc. In the end it turned out that he hadn’t actually flashed the SD card at all. This is an extreme case.)
We did make sure that Jessica was rewarded for all her hard work: this is what we were doing on Monday.
Thanks Jessica!
Gigapi: a Raspberry Pi rig for gigapixel photography
via Raspberry Pi
We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals. Case in point: gigapixel photography. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of until recently.
At the moment, a camera that can take a gigapixel image all in one shot is the sort of fantasy hardware that the military is pouring millions into. But if you’re not in charge of a defence silo, you can still take your own gigapixel images by stitching together many megapixel-sized images from an SLR camera on a motorised mount into a giant, seamless mosaic with very fine detail. You’ll need something approaching a defence budget if you’re going to do this yourself without building your own hardware, though; I spent a few seconds googling and found that off-the-shelf motorised rigs for your camera can cost nearly $1000.
Tim and Jack Stocker thought this was daft, so they built their own out of MDF, some Lego turntables, and a Pi with a cheap stepper motor attached.
Gigapi in use. (We love the yellow paint job – it’s a beautifully made piece of kit.) Click to enlarge.
This is the instrument box Tim is holding in the photo above, opened so you can peer inside. Click to enlarge.
The Pi has a lot of computation to do here: Jack’s software (which you can download on GitHub) works out the horizontal and vertical angles required, the camera sensor size, the length of zoom used and the image overlap required to stitch everything together into a tidy mosaic later on. It figures out how many photos are needed to complete the picture, when the stepper motors should be moved, and by how much and in what order; and when and for how long the shutter should be opened – it also deals with the focus.
You’ll find a long description of how to reproduce the Stockers’ setup, with a parts list, enough information for you to make your own shutter control circuit and more at GigaPi.
For obvious reasons, I can’t host a sample gigapixel image here. But you can find some pictures taken with the Stockers’ rig, one of which is a simply ridiculous 15.2 gigapixels (and enormous fun; it’s full of Easter eggs, and the detail’s so good that you can count how many peanuts are left in the bird feeder) at gigapan.com.
Bonus fact of the day: Sophie Wilson, of ARM and BBC Micro fame, is also a gigapixel photographer, and she’s created some really beautiful pictures using the technique – the architectural photos are my favourites. She occasionally gives talks in and around Cambridge on the subject, minus the Raspberry Pi (I spotted an advert for one in my local post office last week). Keep an eye out if you’re in town.