This was a version 2B when I bought it and I chose this kit over the same-priced Canakit because this one had a 16GB microSD card vs 8GB in the Canakit.
I am impressed that the voltage from the included power supply is only 5.17V no load, since cheap supplies are often not well regulated. The voltage drops to 5.08V with the system booted & idle with a 5" LCD display, and 5.07V running the thermal camera. With a WD "My Passport Ultra" Terabyte drive attached, the supply voltage drops to 4.99V. I find that the 1.5m supply cord, is a bit too short for my environment, however.
I was very pleased that the Raspbian system installed in less than 20 minutes rather than the hour or 2 I am accustomed for a typical Debian install. I believe all this did was unzip the system from the archive on the "recovery" partition so it didn't go through the usual unpack, set up, process triggers, run mandb, etc., etc.. This is probably only possible because the hardware is always the same...until you add a touch screen.
There are 2 indicator LEDs on the pi but the included black case has no holes or "windows" for them to shine through. The case is hard to get off the Pi because one of the locking tabs is where the case is tight against the LAN connector so you can't pinch the case to release the locking tab. I therefore cut that locking tab off. Otherwise, the case seems to fit well.
I have purposes in mind for several of these but became obsessed with taking this one mobile so I bought a
5 inch LCD
touch screen & built a case to house the system with a set of
Eneloop AA cells
.
A bit of nerdy information for the other nerds out there:
After NOOBS has installed the system (I didn't look before that) The 16GB microSD card has 4 partitions on it:
1) A 1.2GB primary vfat partition labelled "RECOVERY", which contains the Raspbian image & other recovery related stuff, including some instructions.
2) A 34.5MB logical ext4 partition labelled "SETTINGS", which I'm guessing is NOOBS setup info.
3) A 66MB logical vfat partition labelled "boot", which gets mounted to the boot directory on the root partition.
4) A 14.6GB logical partition labelled "root", which contains the installed system
With 4.9V battery voltage, these are some current readings (the voltage without the Ammeter is 4.95V):
With the 5" LCD attached:
0.5A to 0.7A during boot
0.58A idle running after boot. About 0.2A less with backlight off
0.7A running thermal camera OR with pcmanfm consuming an entire core of CPU time
0.96A with WD "My Passport Ultra" 1 terabyte drive attached & idle (1.23A max during drive startup)
0.3A after shutdown
With the 5" LCD removed & keyboard, mouse, & 19" HDMI monitor attached:
0.2A to 0.37A during boot
0.22A idle running after boot
0.37A system halted (with or without keyboard & mouse)
I had to use the 10A input on the meter and the readings bounced around 50mA or more, so the above numbers are not real precise.
Using the terabyte drive with this required adding a line (max_usb_current=1) to the config.txt file to get the thing to allow 1.2A for the USB ports. Without that line it limits USB current to 0.6A and the drive just sat there clicking. As you can see from the above numbers, the drive takes only a bit more than 0.6A and not even that much when idle.
I found that the Rpi fails to run when the NO-load battery voltage gets down to 4.34V.
I don't use wi-fi at home so I have not tested the wi-fi adapter. It does pick up a few of the neighborhood routers, though.
| Processor | 1.2 GHz |
|---|---|
| RAM | 16 GB |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth |
