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

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 04/18/2013 04:43 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> 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.

I was seeing the drives having their own external power.  The reason for 
POE was to not tie up one usb port for power.

But the fact that the ethernet is really a usb device kind of really 
limits this approach.  Not so attractive anymore.  Thanks for the 
information.

>
>> 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?

I had this url at the end of my original post:

http://www.xtronix.net/datasheets/Raspberry_Pi_PoE_Data_Sheet.pdf

>
>> 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.

I will look into it.  The remix part does put me off a bit though.