One more go at new enclosures for the Amiga 1200. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter campaign, and we mentioned a similar the same campaign last month. The previous campaign received a little more than half of the desired funding in a 30-day campaign. The new campaign received half its funding in a week. The only difference? Now you can put a Raspberry Pi in a newly manufactured A1200 case. And they say Raspberry Pi consumerism isn’t a thing…
Cheap SLA printing service. [Ian] and Dangerous Prototypes have made a name for themselves with dirt cheap, acceptable quality PCBs. Now they’re going for custom prints on a resin machine. It’s $0.95 per gram (density is 1.3g/cc). That’s cheap.
[James Willis] built a floppy drive orchestra. There are 16 drives in this orchestra, all controlled by an FPGA. Here’s the writeup.
Here’s a video overview of a real, huge, rideable hexapod robot. ‘Wow’ is just about the only thing we got for this.
Western Digital introduced a hard drive made specifically for the Raspberry Pi. It’s a hard drive with a USB interface, and a USB cable that connects to the Pi, the drive, and a power adapter. In other news, externally powered USB hard drives exist. You can buy a 2TB drive for the price of the 1TB PiDrive. What was that thing about Raspi consumerism?
Next week is the Open Hardware Summit in Philadelphia. We’ll be there (or rather, I will). We’ll have a post on the OHS badge up on Monday. Would anyone like to go see the lady made out of soap? It’s right around the corner from the venue.
“Cheap SLA printing service”
…Hearst was in the printing business, no?
(GOML) ;)
The $0.95/g SLA is a great deal! That works out to $1.235/cm3. In comparison, Shapeways’ SLA prints are $2.99/cm3 plus a $2.50 handling fee: http://www.shapeways.com/materials/acrylic-plastic
The last step(s) seem(s) to be really important to WD:
“6. Plug the USB Type A male plug of the power cord into the provided 5V power adapter.
7. Plug the USB Type A male plug of the power cord into the provided 5V power adapter.”
They pretty much screwed it up at many things. For example, they’ve written about compatibility with RPI 2 and RPI B+, but I see no reason why the thing wouldn’t be compatible with all the other versions – and given their target auditory, they will at best receive questions like “are you sure/why” or at worst actually lose deals. I have one thought on why it could be true – both B+ and B2 are special because they have this circuit regulating USB current (don’t have an A+ right now, can’t see if it’s there too). But then why’d the drive need to take current from the RPi?
Also, they include a MicroSD but don’t even have the capacity mentioned (on the photo it looks like 4GB). But at least… 1 cable is less than 2 cables, this is hard to argue about.
Oh, and one of my favourite lines:
>>>3. It looks cool. Like, really cool. A favorite feature of our testers is that you can actually see how everything works and the drive is visually synced with the Raspberry Pi board.
I can understand a person who wrote this part. It’s frustrating when you’re writing a list of features your thing has and can’t even think of three advantages, so you make something up.
>>>For information on how to partition, format, mount, mount persistently, and other advanced setup options, such as booting from the WD PiDrive, please go to wdlabs.wd.com/community
I can’t help but giggle at the thought of guys with “how-to-put-Raspbian-on-microSD” questions flooding the WD forum.
I mean, sometimes I make things just because I want to. It’s funny to see companies that possibly do the same ;-) Oh, and somebody will make an Instructable on this in a week or so.
most people using a raspi should be smart enough to either make or look up how to make that special cable that comes with the wd drive and then just use it on a normal wd passport.
Why make them?
There just two way USB leads (I’m ignoring the fact that it can power the pi and the drive)
I would probably have bought one of those PiDrives if it came in an enclosure that housed both the Pi and the drive, a tangle of cables isn’t so very neat.
do people know about this dongle?
http://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Support-Multiplier-Patent-Pending/dp/B005DCCMII
I have one and it works well for usb3, at least. on my laptop, I can connect over usb3 to a port-multiplier sata cage (raid, jbod, whatever) and it stays connected, its fast, its reliable and it DOES support port multiplier. make sure you have usb-scsi option enabled in the kernel (forgot the actual name, but its ‘usb attached scsi’ or something like that).
the dongle is expensive but it does work and it would probably work for the pi, too. just a damned shame that the pi has such a borked usb connection and its not even usb3, at that.
drives on a pi seem like an exercise in frustration. NAS over the network to a pi also sucks since the ethernet port goes THRU the stupid usb port and the usb port is broken by design.
you really need a native scsi or at least clean usb3 system in order to really ‘do drives well’ these days. movies and flac files are big, these days (dsd audio files are huge!) and it just takes too long to go thru usb2 for large file i/o. each time I think about making the pi be a disk server or even disk client, I keep remembering how bad its usb2 impl is ;(
If you’re going to be in Philly, consider heading over to the Franklin Institute and checking out The Art Of The Brick. I recently had a chance to see it, it was pretty cool.