YAPP: A Sailing Raspberry Pi

[Conachair]

At last, OpenCPN on Raspberry Pi now works

If you want to know the gory details, see here: http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f134/chart-problems-on-raspberry-pi-86528.html

download and install a pre-built OpenCPN package for the Pi: http://agurney.com/raspberry-pi

Build it yourself: standard instructions on opencpn.org


Alisdair

Yeah baby!!!! Saw the thread over on CF. I'll give it a go in the morning. Huge cool points to all involved.

 

[stu3284]

Hopefully when the udoo ( http://www.udoo.org/ ) gets released, this will make it a lot easier.

 

[cozzykim]

Hopefully when the udoo ( http://www.udoo.org/ ) gets released, this will make it a lot easier.

I must admit that my Pi is languishing in a box of bits.

It just doesn't have enough memory or CPU grunt to do the things I'd like it to.

It feels to me like the BBC Model B, limited at birth by its choice of components.

The BBC with a Z80 or 6809 would have been even more of a killer machine, IMHO.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

I must admit that my Pi is languishing in a box of bits.

It just doesn't have enough memory or CPU grunt to do the things I'd like it to.

It feels to me like the BBC Model B, limited at birth by its choice of components.

The BBC with a Z80 or 6809 would have been even more of a killer machine, IMHO.

The BBC was OK - but to get any performance you had to use assembler. BBC Basic was, as you say, too slow for any serious work. Agree a Z80 might have been better, but the speed differential wasn't that great, and the overheads of an interpreted language would probably have minimized the advantages.

 

[stu3284]

The BBC was OK - but to get any performance you had to use assembler......

6502 assembly language. That takes me back a bit The upcoming udoo seems to have a lot of grunt. According to the site its the equivalent of 4 Pi's and has quite a few other useful bits onboard.

 

[cozzykim]

The BBC was OK - but to get any performance you had to use assembler. BBC Basic was, as you say, too slow for any serious work. Agree a Z80 might have been better, but the speed differential wasn't that great, and the overheads of an interpreted language would probably have minimized the advantages.

I have to disagree with that bit, (sorry ).

I think that BBC Basic was the strength of the Beeb, the tokenised basic made it a flyer, partially compiled compared to the totally interpreted M$ basic for example.

A friend and I jointly disassembled the BBC Basic Rom, to see how it worked and the tokenised subroutines were amazingly clever, (I still have the source on dot matrix paper somewhere)

I once demonstrated a simple bouncing ball program written in BBC Basic running on a BBC B, and simultaneously running on a 286 written in M$ Basic.

The Beeb ball flew around the screen so fast that you couldn't see it, whereas the PC plodded along.

I think that the inherent weakness of the Beeb was its 8 bit registers and addressing, which could have been vastly improved with a better CPU.

Yes, I did do some assembly language on the Beeb, as well as MC programming (just to be masochistic ), but nothing since

Programming ain't really my thing, too laborious and tedious.

 

[agurney]

I must admit that my Pi is languishing in a box of bits.

It just doesn't have enough memory or CPU grunt to do the things I'd like it to.

It feels to me like the BBC Model B, limited at birth by its choice of components.

The BBC with a Z80 or 6809 would have been even more of a killer machine, IMHO.

My Pi was fine on the boat over the weekend:
- OpenCPN
- email and web browsing
- ADB-S
- and a bit of general tinkering

I left the Pi running overnight downloading and building a large project connected to marina wifi and it didn't make a dent in the boat's battery ... my laptop would have drained it.

The beeb was an excellent tool for its intended purpose - education.
When the BBC micro was introduced I was involved in teaching IT in local schools; we had rooms full of the latest kit .. at that time Amstrad business machines and 286 PCs (IBM factory just down the road, so state of the art) for business studies, the first of Apple Macintoshes for graphic design and publication, and BBC micros for computing, control technology and pre-Internet networking (Compuserve etc.) ... the BBCs more than held their own.

 

[cozzykim]

My Pi was fine on the boat over the weekend:
- OpenCPN
- email and web browsing
- ADB-S
- and a bit of general tinkering

I left the Pi running overnight downloading and building a large project connected to marina wifi and it didn't make a dent in the boat's battery ... my laptop would have drained it.

The beeb was an excellent tool for its intended purpose - education.
When the BBC micro was introduced I was involved in teaching IT in local schools; we had rooms full of the latest kit .. at that time Amstrad business machines and 286 PCs (IBM factory just down the road, so state of the art) for business studies, the first of Apple Macintoshes for graphic design and publication, and BBC micros for computing, control technology and pre-Internet networking (Compuserve etc.) ... the BBCs more than held their own.

The Pi's low power consumption is a powerful reason to use one aboard.

I think it would be a much better machine with double the onboard RAM.

I think it will get sidelined by newer machines like the udoo if it's hardware isn't updated, which will be a crying shame.

You can't fault the principle behind low resource computing, you only have to remember Elite or Defender on the Beeb to see what can be done with careful programming. (plus a ROM based OS isn't vulnerable to virus corruption and loads very quickly)

Bloatware rules the roost now, sadly

I still think that the Beeb was doomed from day one, due to its 6502's 8 bit registers.