[Beowulf] A cluster of Arduinos

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

Interesting...
That seems to be a growing trend, then.  So, now we just have to wait for them to actually exist.   The $35 B style board has Ethernet, and assuming one could netboot and operate "headless", then a stack o'raspberry PIs and a cheap Ethernet switch might be an alternate approach.

The "per node" cost is comparable to the Arduino, and it's true that Ethernet is probably more congenial in the long run. 

Drawing 700mA off the microUSB, though..  That's fairly hefty (although not a big deal in general.. you might need to have some better power supply scheme for a basket o'pi cluster.  (Arduino Uno runs around 40-50 mA)


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Chris Samuel
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 5:05 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] A cluster of Arduinos

On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:58:13 AM Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> Also, does the Raspberry PI $25 price point include a power supply?

I thought the plan was for them to be powered from the HDMI connector, but it appears I was wrong, it looks like it can use either microUSB or the GPIO header.

http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard

# The board takes fixed 5V input, (with the 1V2 core voltage generated # directly from the input using the internal switch-mode supply on the # BCM2835 die). This permits adoption of the micro USB form factor, # which, in turn, prevents the user from inadvertently plugging in # out-of-range power inputs; that would be dangerous, since the 5V # would go straight to HDMI and output USB ports, even though the # problem should be mitigated by some protections applied to the input # power: The board provides a polarity protection diode, a voltage # clamp, and a self-resetting semiconductor fuse.