[fedora-arm] Raspberry PI thoughts - slightly OT?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:38 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
> I don't know how support for the Raspberry PI is with Fedora.  It is listed
> as an ARM chip, though a proprietary Broadcom design.  It fits here right?
>
> What I was thinking was have it powered via POE (either from a switch with
> POE or a Powerline adapter with POE, I have read of one of these).  Put this
> in a case, and you would have 2 USB ports for drives.
>
> About right?

The first problem I see is that you would need to convert the 44V at
350ma to the 5V at around 1A that you need to run the RPi properly,
I'm not sure there's PoE power adapters that can do that. That's
before you've even provided power to the drive(s). The ethernet also
runs over the USB which means you've got perf issues that will
severely limit any form of decent performance and a lot of people have
said there's issues with the USB bus.

> Now to find a case that will hold not just the PI, but also the POE card
> (and the short cable connecting the two, they should have included POE on
> the board).

Is there a PoE card available that can make those conversions?

> This MIGHT be my next attempt for a NAS after getting the pogoplug working.

If you want something like that I would look at the Cubieboard. The
A10 devices have a proper PHY attached ethernet and a proper SATA port
which should give you half decent performance. The support for A10
devices at the moment is by a remix (like the RPi) but it's a much
better speced device and the support will only improve where I can't
imagine the RPi getting much better than it is now.

Peter