Saturday, December 5, 2015

Raspberry Pi Zero - Screenshots - Sunday Dec. 6th Update!

Here are the screenshots that I promised in my first post about the Pi Zero.



First off, we have a "Jessie" screenshot of the Pi 2 B,
you can see that it is running at 900mHz and that it has almost 1gb of RAM.



Secondly, we have the same SD image of "Jessie" in the Zero and
it shows it running at 1gHz with 512mbs of RAM.



Here is the next shot of the default web browser with a DuckDuckGo search page, GIMP in the lower right-hand corner and the Task Manager; showing about 1/3 of the RAM being used with very little CPU time.





Finally we have the MagPi website up, Libre Office Writer and the Task Manager shows the about the same amount of RAM being used as before, but due to the activity of the web page the CPU is maxed out, which isn't surprising.


I will add to this same page with additional screenshots Sunday afternoon.  They will include the menus off of the "Menu" button.


Please stay tuned!


Sunday Dec. 6th.  Update!
The Following screenshots, are of the the items in the MENU bar, but I was not able to take direct screenshots of it.  These are the same items just in their 'file explorer' under 'Applications' view, instead.

Accessories

Games

Internet

Office [Libre Office]

Preferences

Programming

Applications



Thursday, December 3, 2015

Raspberry Pi Zero - Initial Thoughts

My Pi Zero arrived this evening and here are some of my first experiences with it.

I bought mine from Adafruit in the wee hours of the 26th and right after I checked out and confirmed my order, I went back to the page for the Pi Zero and saw that it had already sold out.  It has been re-stocked at least twice, that I know of, and has sold out again within an half an hour each time.

Here is what I got:  Pi Zero, Pi Protector, HDMI Mini to Standard HDMI adapter, USB OTG host cable, and 2 sets of headers for the GPIO; the straight ones - male to male and male to 90° angle female.  All for less than the cost of 5 *bucks coffee drinks.



The Adafruit box, in it's glory, at least to me.  
I have had many of these boxes arrive before but this one seemed to be special



What appeared inside, after I pulled the pulled the important stuff to the surface.



Now the Zero out of it's ESD bag.



Here we see the Zero hooked up and some other items for size comparison.
The standard SD card shows that this is just about the same size, in height and about 3 across in width.




This is the current USB hub that I am using with power.


As prepared as I was, I still ran into some snags.  First, before it arrived I imaged a couple of micro SD cards with the latest Raspbian, Jessie on them.  So, when I had it setup and connected I just plugged one in and booted it up.  Upon start-up I was greeted by the new interface and realized that I couldn't do any updates yet, due to, my fault really, in unable to find the WPA-GUI program.  This was my first issue that I researched, from another computer and found the answer pretty quickly.  The Network icon down near the clock had all the functionality of the old program but none of the clunky stuff , which is great!

After this, I loaded the new Add-Remove Software program, and found it really easy to use, with the caveat being, that you can only use either the Install OR the Uninstall at one time, you can't install one thing while uninstalling something else.

One thing that I did find, while using some of my Wheezy cards, I had to update them with  my Pi 2 B, first, then load them up in the Zero, so having a B+ and/or a Pi 2 B very handy if you want/need to keep Wheezy around for use in your Zero.

Next time:  Some screenshots and some stats for your enjoyment!