The Raspberry Pi continues to successfully storm onwards and upwards! There’s by now well over a million of ’em and they are getting to far flung and unlikely places. Recently, there’s one newly (em)powering The Kingdom of Bhutan. There’s also a recent twin adventure of RasPi and Ava in the sky, including some fun stories and first pictures from the new RasPi Cam:
The Pi balloon: a Swiss mystery
PIE5: Watching A Big Cheese Over Switzerland
From the Raspberry Pi team:
PIE went up with one of our prototype camera boards, which Dave had switched to the auto setting. It performed brilliantly right up until it got into the stratosphere, when it started having trouble with the very pronounced contrast between the darkness of space and the brightness of the sun. This is something we can address in tuning for later flights, but it did produce a rather wonderful artefact which looked for all the world like a giant Raspberry Pi logo in space. (Sheer serendipity: this wasn’t planned.)
(Note that these pictures are very heavily jpg compressed and ‘low-res’ versions as compared to the native 5 MPixels of the RasPi Camera Board.)
Even The Register adds to the story:
Raspberry Pi space jaunt ends in dramatic mountain rescue
Blighty’s two-pronged High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) assault on Europe over the weekend ended dramatically with the rescue of one payload from the slopes of a snow-capped Austrian mountain, while the other is officially AWOL somewhere in France.
Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team members Dave Akerman and Anthony Stirk launched two mighty orbs – PIE and AVA – on Saturday from Cambridgeshire…
Great fun! 🙂
For lots of pseudo-cloudy RasPi fun, here’s an interesting upstart storming ahead:
Raspberry Pi colocation
Hot stuff!
Just to keep things even more interesting, there’s a few more new Pi-like devices hot on the trail:
BeagleBone Black aims to compete with Raspberry Pi
The Register also adds a few comments:
Black-eyed Pies reel from BeagleBoard’s $45 Linux micro blow
Spreading out a little further, there is:
Cubieboard
And a little something next to blow our socks off:
Adapteva Shows Off $99 Supercomputer Boards
Getting back down to something more like Earthly business, TechRadar have done a good review of a handful of distros that are available for the RasPi:
Raspberry Pi operating systems: 5 reviewed and rated
Here’s a cool way to cool your RasPi:
Don’t bake your Raspberry Pi – now you can WATER COOL it
Completely OTT but certainly custom cool looking! 🙂
Here’s a rather beautifully colourful cluster of RasPi to outdo a PC!
US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
… And even better, all the details are laid bare (PDF) in true FLOSS style 🙂
(Technical note: If you can make use of the RasPi Broadcom chip GPU processing or you can benefit from the RasPi ecosystem, then a RasPi cluster is good fun. Also worth considering for a little more CPU grunt would be similarly clustering such as the BeagleBone…)
Not to be outdone…
Google are experimenting with their own stratospheric balloons near space:
Google tests balloons to beam internet from near space