A rumor that has been swirling around the Raspberry Pi hardware community for a significant time has proven to have a basis in fact. The Raspberry Pi 2 has lost its BCM2836 32-bit processor, and gained the 64-bit BCM2837 processor from its newer sibling, the Raspberry Pi 3. It seems this switch was made weeks ago without any fanfare on the release of the Pi 2 V1.2 board revision, so we are among many news sources that were caught on the hop.

The new board is not quite a Pi 3 masquerading as a Pi 2 though. The more capable processor is clocked at a sedate 900MHz as opposed to the Pi 3’s 1.2GHz and there is no Bluetooth or WiFi on board, but the new revision will of course benefit from the extra onboard cache and the 64-bit cores.

This move almost certainly has its roots in saving the cost of BCM2836 production in the face of falling Pi 2 sales after the launch of the Pi 3. It makes sense for the Foundation to keep the Pi 2 in their range though as the board has found a home in many embedded products for which the Pi 3’s wireless capabilities and extra power consumption are not an asset.

The full specification for the revised board can be found on the Raspberry Pi web site.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/

Back in September a new version of the Pi2 quietly appeared on Farnell’s website without a fanfare. It’s exactly the same as the original Pi2 except the processor is BCM2837 running at 900 MHz instead of the BCM2836.

Why the New Revision?

By changing processors to the Pi3’s BCM2837, the older BCM2836 can cease production and the Pi2 gets an upgrade to the newer, faster A53 CPU. To keep the BCM2836 in production in small quantities no longer made economic sense.

Does Anyone Still Use Pi2?

The Pi2B 1.2 is mainly for industrial clients who built systems round Pi2. Upgrading the silicon enables the Pi2 to stay in production, but also effectively offers a ‘no-wifi’ variant of Pi3. Some applications don’t want or need wifi/BT capability (additional compliance/security concerns). So now you have a choice.

How Much is it?

$35 – same as Pi3B. Unless you have a compelling reason, I’d still favour the Pi3B for most uses, but I bought one for the collection.

Up-to-date Distro Required

If you buy one, you’ll need an up-to-date OS image with the latest kernel and firmware or it won’t boot.

The Linux 4.5 merge window has been open for the last two weeks; that means that the 4.5-rc1 kernel is expected to emerge, with the official kernel following in about eight weeks.

Linux 4.5 is set to bring many new features across the kernel’s 20 million line code-base. Among the new/improved features are Raspberry Pi 2 support, open-source Raspberry Pi 3D support, NVIDIA Tegra X1 / Jetson TX1 support, an open-source Vivante graphics driver

The Many New Features & Improvements Of The Linux 4.5 Kernel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-45-features&num=1

- While the VC4 DRM driver was previously added as the Raspberry Pi kernel mode-setting driver, the kernels up to now haven’t had the necessary bits for supporting 3D/OpenGL in conjunction with the new VC4 Gallium3D driver from Mesa. However, with Linux 4.5 those needed kernel bits are in place for having a fully open Raspberry Pi 3D driver stack.

A little over a year after Intel’s Galileo development board got its first taste of Microsoft Windows, Redmond has decided to pull the project.

Chipzilla’s Raspberry Pi-like Galileo was anointed as able-to-run-Windows in August 2014, courtesy of the 1.0.2 firmware update for the Gen1 device. In the same month Intel launched the Gen2 board (which got its stripped-down Windows 8 version in October 2014).

Microsoft was also handing out Galileo devices free to developers joining its Internet of Things program.

Alas, there’s no weight-loss program good enough to fit Windows 10 IoT Core into the Galileo, so Redmond has set November 30 as end-of-life for the development boards.

Raspberry Pi is the officially designated migration target: “Wiring support is now available on Windows 10 IoT Core running on Raspberry Pi 2. This allows you to migrate your existing Galileo projects to Windows 10 IoT Core”, the company notes.

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/Faqs.htm#galileo

Will you continue to support the Windows Developer Program for IoT for Intel Galileo?

No. We continue to focus on providing a great experience for Makers with Windows 10 IoT Core. While we’ve seen some fantastic innovation with the platform, unfortunately it does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 IoT Core.

When the folks who make the Raspberry Pi made good on their plan to release a multi-core version of the tiny computer with 1GB of RAM earlier this year, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to put the single-board Linux box to work—real work—in our company’s network operations center.

NYSERNet, Inc., is an optical networking company that provides high-speed connections for New York state’s leading universities and research centers. Part of our job is to keep an eye on a fiber network that stretches from Buffalo to New York City. If something does down, we need to know quickly.

In the past, we had a walk-up command center that featured ten wall-mounted 19-inch monitors powered by two large-form Windows PC towers loaded with heavy-duty video cards and enough VRAM to make everything work. The screens showed network maps, data-center views and weather, among other things.

But during a recent office remodel, we decided all the cabling, clunky-looking PCs and video-card sharing needed to go. We wanted the new space—with two new 50-inch Ultra HD monitors

Enter the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

With its powerful new four-core processor and double the RAM of its immediate predecessor, the RPi seemed to be the perfect computer not only to drive our large new 4K monitors, but also to run several important applications used by the NOC team, including a Java-based network map, Iceweasel (a Firefox Web browser derivative) and InterMapper, a proprietary network monitoring tool. Raspbian, a Debian derivative that fits well with our Ubuntu shop, would be an ideal choice for the OS.

necessary—system to a pair of $35 RPis

I ran some preliminary tests on an HP Mini running Windows 8.1 and on the RPi 2 Model B. The Mini could muster only 1080p, but I found the RPi could indeed provide the resolution I wanted with its built-in full-size HDMI port and on-board Broadcom graphics. I also found I could do it without having to set the poor RPi on fire by overclocking it to the max.

For this project, I needed two RPis, one for each new large-screen TV.

Once your RPi is up and running, it’s a good idea to connect it to your network. If something goes wrong with the video settings during this setup, you’ll want another way to edit the configuration files. Giving the RPi an address on your network and setting up SSH will do just that.

If you’re able to find a kit with a pre-installed Raspbian (or NOOBS) SD card, that’ll work fine. Other flavors, such as Arch Linux ARM and Pidora, also may be good options,

Using the raspi-config tool (built in to Raspbian), you can fine-tune how the computer handles memory, video display and a host of other RPi parameters. For my purposes, I used it to work with three things:

Overclocking

Overscan

Memory Split

By the way, these settings also can be modified by editing /boot/config.txt

Out of the box, the RPi commits 64MB of its 1GB to the GPU. That’s not nearly enough to give the pixel resolution we want. After some experimenting, I found that maxing out the memory for the GPU (512) worked best

Once the overscan, overclocking and memory split modifications are complete, the rest of the heavy lifting for this project is done in the boot configuration script: /boot/config.txt

First, disable overscanning:
disable_overscan=1

If the RPi doesn’t automatically detect your HDMI display, uncomment the hdmi_force_hotplug=1 line. That should fix it.

In order to get the RPi to support the Ultra HD screen resolution, you’ll need to use hdmi_group and hdmi_mode to enable custom settings. The hdmi_group parameter sets the type of display you’re using: 0 will auto-detect, 1 will set CEA (typical for televisions), and 2 will set DMT (typical for monitors).

Driving the Vizio TV requires a custom resolution that is not offered in any of the preset modes, so you’ll need to set the HDMI output format to 87, a custom mode:

# Make our custom resolution the default
hdmi_mode=8

With the custom mode set, you now need to add the specific parameters for Coordinated Video Timings (CVT)

I also set the framebuffer width and height to match my hdmi_cvt width and height, and then set a high pixel frequency limit:

max_framebuffer_width=3840
max_framebuffer_height=2160
hdmi_pixel_freq_limit=400000000

After some trial and error, these settings worked well.

Because I have both RPis running in graphical mode, I need a keyboard and mouse

I didn’t want a bunch of keyboards and mice

The answer was SSH and its x2x feature.
With x2x, you can move the mouse (and keyboard focus) from one RPi to the other, one monitor to the other, as though the screens were attached to a single computer. It’s fast and seamless.

I attached a Bluetooth USB dongle to the primary RPi I called rpi01. It was immediately detected by the system and connected my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The RPi is friendly to most modern Bluetooth USB adapters

Set Up VNC as a Remote-Control Alternative

a good alternative to SSH x2x is VNC.

Create a profile for each RPi to which you want to connect. Give each profile a name, ensure that you’ve selected the VNC protocol, enter the server address for the RPi, use the default RPi account (usually pi unless you’ve changed it), and set the color depth and quality.

I used a color depth of 256 colors and “Poor” quality, because I wanted a better remote-user experience.

Final Thoughts

Because your RPis probably are sitting on a network, it’s a good idea to secure them with a firewall. I set up some iptables rules that block almost all traffic.

Also, to make the RPis even easier to maintain, you may want to install Webmin, a free Web-based administration tool for Linux environments. It works well under Raspbian and doesn’t hog resources when it’s not in use.

Ubuntu Core is a tiny Ubuntu distribution aimed at the Internet of Things, using a new transactional packaging format called Snappy rather than the venerable Debian packaging format. It recently gained support for I2C and GPIO on the Raspberry Pi 2

https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/

Snappy apps and Ubuntu Core itself can be upgraded atomically and rolled back if needed — a bulletproof approach that is perfect for deployments where predictability and reliability are paramount. It’s called “transactional” or “image-based” systems management, and we’re delighted to make it available on every Ubuntu certified cloud.

Since the release of the Model A and B in 2012 and through the follow-up releases of the Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2, an official case has always been one rather obvious omission from the product stack. Because the Raspberry Pi is designed for a range of uses—DIY maker machinations to low-cost educational computing—it never really made sense to provide one. Instead, the Foundation encouraged people and third-party vendors to make and/or sell their own. As such we’ve seen some wonderful cases over the years, including offerings made of 3D-printed plastic, Lego bricks, and even hand-crafted wood.

Now, the Foundation has stepped in. The official case for the Raspberry Pi 2 (and the Model B+) was designed in partnership with Kinneir Dufort. It’s made of injection moulded plastic and comes in four parts: a raspberry-coloured main chassis and three clip-on panels

[JosephErnest] wanted a cost-effective alternative to the commercially available MIDI samplers and expanders on the market. He also wanted to avoid being tethered to a computer all the time. His solution is the SamplerBox, a standalone drop-and-play sampler that costs less than 100 euros to make. Simply insert an SD card with your sample set in WAV format, boot it up, and play it through your keyboard or MIDI controller to your heart’s content!

http://www.samplerbox.org/

Drop’n’play sampler: drop .WAV samples on the SD card, and play!
Open source / open hardware
Raspberry Pi computer inside!
Cheap: < 99€ to build it
Boot time: 8 seconds
Polyphony: more than 128 voices
Latency: 11,6 ms
Memory: can load sample-sets up to 1 GB

When a consumer goes today to buy a PC, he will be sold easily with the latest Intel processor and equipped with a fast SSD memory model, which is easily accumulated cost at least several hundred euros, even more. Yet the truth is that most of the needs sufficient for a few ten euros Raspberry Pi card performance.

Raspberry Pi Card can be run on multiple Linux distributions. Datamationin test is a good example, they have tested Debian-based Raspbian. According to the test Raspbianilla can be Raspberry Pi card to make almost everything purebred with a laptop or desktop computer.

For example, the LibreOffice office suite revolves almost flawlessly (lots of big tables in document was a bit slow) – the biggest challenge comes in to save the transcripts as Raspberry Pi does not have traditional built-in hard disk.

Datamationin test Raspberry Pi to run the Firefox browser flexibly. Testers, the most surprising was the fact that the card used to run the Youtube videos. VLC repeater to run videos quite smoothly.

This shows that the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s argument that the second generation of card is right for the PC, it is true

Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2918:raspberry-pi-riittaisi-useimmille-tietokoneeksi&catid=13&Itemid=101

First Look Microsoft has released a preview of Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2, the £30 ARMv7 computer board produced by the Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The version of Windows 10 for the Pi (which is also available for the Intel Atom MinnowBoard Max) is called Windows IoT Core, one of three Windows 10 IoT editions. The other two are Windows 10 IoT for mobile devices (which is ARM only and similar to Windows 10 Mobile) and Windows 10 IoT for industry devices, which is Intel only and similar to Windows 10 Enterprise, tweaked to run a single locked-down application such as for a cash or vending machine.

In other words, the company has hijacked the IoT (Internet of Things) buzzword and applied it to embedded Windows. That said, the old Windows CE apparently lives on for those who need it, since unlike other versions of Windows it is a real-time operating system (RTOS).

Windows 10 IoT Core is an oddity in that while it does have a GUI stack, it is limited to Microsoft’s Universal App Platform (UAP), though note that this includes DirectX as well as XAML (Microsoft’s presentation language for UAP) and HTML.

This means that there is no Windows desktop, nor even a command prompt. That said, it does support PowerShell remoting, which gets you a remote PowerShell terminal from which you can run familiar Windows commands.

The price? “Windows 10 will include a new IoT edition for small devices that is tuned to run Windows universal apps and drivers and is royalty free to makers and device builders,” said Microsoft’s Don Box in this post.

Note that IoT Core is not limited to UAP apps. Native Win32 apps run, but you will not see any output other than in a remote session. You can create server apps, though, and one of the samples uses Node.js with a native extension to return memory status to a browser. There is no web server in IoT Core, but Node.js has one built-in. Node.js normally uses the Chrome JavaScript runtime, but in this case it uses Microsoft’s Chakra engine instead.

Getting Started

Setting up Windows 10 IoT Core on a Pi 2 is a matter of signing up to Microsoft’s preview programme, downloading an SD card image and writing it to a card using Windows 10 technical preview. The documentation says you need a physical Windows 10 machine in order to get access to a card reader, but apparently VMWare can also work.

Next, you pop the card into your Pi, preferably with an HDMI display attached, and boot up. You can also connect a USB keyboard and mouse. It takes a while to boot – especially the first time, when some set-up tasks run – but it worked first time for me, displaying a screen of information including the device name and IP address.

Doing anything with the Pi requires a remote connection. I was able to connect via PowerShell, change the password and deploy a HelloWorld UAP app from Visual Studio 2015 running on Windows 10 build 10074. Everything worked first time. File sharing is on by default and I was able to browse the file system from another PC using the built-in administrative shares C$ and D$.

The overall size of Windows IoT Core is similar to the stripped-down Nano Server
the Windows folder on the Pi contains 809MB in 3,356 files

Does the Raspberry Pi need Windows?

Does the Raspberry Pi need Windows? It already runs several varieties of Linux, including Raspbian (based on Debian), Ubuntu and Fedora. These distributions lack the peculiarities of Windows IoT Core, with full access to the local command shell, as well as a desktop GUI should you need it. You can even run .NET applications using Mono and it should support the cross-platform .NET Core as well. So what is the point of Windows?

Putting Windows 10 IoT Core on a Pi makes it less capable than it would be running Linux, but there will still be cases where it makes sense. In an educational context, where you want a smooth workflow for developing an app in Visual Studio, and testing and deploying on the Pi, it could work well.

Visual Studio is a rich IDE, and with support for C#, Visual Basic, Python, Node.js and C++, there is plenty of scope for language experimentation.