The Raspberry Pi is certainly hot in the news at the moment… Especially so for a rather unexpected news flash for some new naked components on the new board:
Raspberry Pi 2 is ‘camera shy’
The latest version of Raspberry Pi’s credit-card-sized budget computer reboots itself when exposed to camera flashes, users have found.
The glitch is a result of the “photoelectric effect” phenomenon. Albert Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that if a light hits a component … it generates a charge, [which for the Raspberry Pi 2] … causes [an electronic] component to reset.
Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton told the BBC the glitch was an “unintentional educational bonus”. “It’s an interesting demonstration of the photoelectric effect,” he said.
Mr Upton admitted that he had not been aware that the Pi would be sensitive to camera flashes, but that he was not too upset about it. “If I had to pick a bug in the Raspberry Pi, excessive sensitivity to paparazzi is the one I would pick,” he added…
… “We have no real plans to fix it,” he added. “We might use a component with more optical screening in the future.”
Forums thread: Why is the PI2 camera-shy?
… Taking it’s picture with a flash causes an instant power off !…
… Xenon flashes cause the issue…
… It appears that U16, the SMPS chip, is the culprit…
… I suspect they are silicon dies mounted on the board without a conventional plastic package, it would explain both their appearance and why they are photosensitive…
… If U16 is indeed ON Semiconductor NCP6343, then U16 is a wafer-level chip scale package.
On a WLCSP, the circuit, that may be sensitive to strong light, is located on the side of the chip that faces the green pcb of the Pi2. So it might be sufficient to only shield light from the side of this chip, so that light cannot get in between the pcb and the bottom-side of U16.
If this theory is right, shielding could be done by deposing a (more or less) opaque glue around the sides of U16, the amount may be so small that it’s hardly visible. You may test the theory by just putting a bit of blu-tac on the sides of U16…
… Silicon that doesn’t have a IR/visible opacity layer will be affected by incident photons that have enough energy to dislodge electrons from the semiconductor lattice. For III-V doped silicon, this is about 1.1eV – so infra-red photons can manage it.
WLCSP packages are basically chunks of silicon with BGA balls on the bottom – so-called “wafer level” packages. These packages are popular in mobile applications as weight- and space-saving has a high priority…
There’s other fun stuff with a few reviews and programming and others adding their presence to the Raspberry Pi phenomenon!
expertreviews: Raspberry Pi 2 review
A far more powerful processor means the Raspberry Pi 2 can stand up as a proper computer…
RasPi.TV: Raspberry Pi2 – Power and Performance Measurement
The new Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU (BCM2836), but it costs the same as the previous B+. All that extra CPU power isn’t a completely free lunch though. If you use it, it’ll cost you slightly more electrical power than the B+. But how much? That’s what we’re here to look at…
Mikronauts.com: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Review
Curious about the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and how it compares to the ODROID C1, Banana Pro, MIPS CI20 and Model B+? I was! Here is my largest and most comprehensive single board computer review to date…
adafruit: Testing raw DPI display capability on the Raspberry Pi 2, Model B and B+
… Did you know that the Broadcom processor on the Raspberry Pi can control a ‘raw dotclock’ type display? Well now you do! A Model B+ or Pi 2 Model B has enough pins for 18-bit color, and since it uses the graphics processor, its really fast…
raspberrypi.org: Emulation on Raspberry Pi 2
People have been emulating classic computers and games consoles on Raspberry Pi since we launched back in 2012. For those of us who bough our first hardware in the 1980s, this is a fun way to take a trip down memory lane, but our relatively modest CPU performance restricted us to third- and fourth-generation platforms. Anything with 3d graphics hardware was pretty much out of the question.
Since we launched Raspberry Pi 2 at the start of the week, people have started posting videos of emulators for fifth-generation consoles running at full speed. Check these out…
TechRepublic: How to get Ubuntu desktop on the Raspberry Pi 2
… With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2 came the announcement the board would run Ubuntu for the first time.
The promised version was Snappy Ubuntu Core, a lightweight, command-line version of the operating system aimed at developers. It didn’t take long, however, for fuller fat versions of the OS to be released for the system…
Google: Coder for Raspberry Pi
Coder is a free, open source project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple platform that educators and parents can use to teach the basics of building for the web. New coders can craft small projects in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right from the web browser…
raspberrypi.org: Linux Voice Giveaway for Schools
The guys at Linux Voice magazine have kindly offered to send out free copies to UK schools!
Linux Voice is a great magazine all about free and open source software and Raspberry Pi news & projects have a strong presence in their contents each month…
And to my eyes, a slightly oddly sponsored odd project:
The school growing a digital forest in Rwanda
… Now the school is one of eight in the UK working with Intel to find [a] way of introducing the internet of things into the curriculum.
As part of that children are issued with Intel Galileo boards – a rival to the Raspberry Pi – which they can use to build robots, soil sensors or weather stations…
… Devices alone, whether they be Galileo boards or tablets brought in from home, will not transform the classroom.
Mr Pugh-Jones has some advice for schools thinking of investing in technology.
“I think schools are missing a trick by saying ‘here’s a load of technology, what can we do with it?’ rather than asking what can technology add to what they are already doing.”
Note also the Raspberry Pi Weather Station development… And the Mag Pi volunteer magazine.
Freedom to choose has got to be good. Even better if all devices can freely interoperable and cooperatively openly work together… 😉
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