The iterations
The Raspberry Pi 1 B rev 2 comes equipped with a BCM2835, is a Broadcom System-on-a-Chip (SoC) with 512MB SDRAM which is also used in various other Raspberry Pi models, including;
- Raspberry Pi 1 Models A,
- Raspberry Pi 1 A+,
- Raspberry Pi 1 B (rev 1 & rev 2),
- Raspberry Pi 1 B+,
- Raspberry Pi Zero, and
- Raspberry Pi Zero W (featuring a single-core ARM1176JZF-S processor.
Processing power
The BCM2835 CPU features in rich as
- 32-bit ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l),
- BogoMIPS @ 697.95,
- Half thumb instruction set,
- Fast-multiplication,
- VFP (Vectored Floating Point),
- EDSP (Enhanced Digital Signal Processing) &
- Java TLS (Transport Layer Security).
Raspberry Pi 1 B rev 2 module layouts various IO's, traversing clockwise from bottom left on the module such as;
- Power via Micro-USB port,
- Full-size SD Card on the bottom side,
- 13x2-pin GPIO male header pins
- plus an adjacent is a 4x2 male header (2.54mm pitch) for UART,
- Composite Video o/p via RCA jack,
- 3.2mm stereo Audio Jack,
- 1 twin USB 2.0 type A ports,
- 10/100 Ethernet port in a RJ45 jack,
- 15-pin flex-strip header (1mm pitch),
- HDMI port for video out,
- another 15-pin flex-strip header (1mm pitch) slightly onboard from left for a display connector,
- almost in the center is a 1x8 male header (2.54mm pitch) In-circuit debug pin and,
- adjacent is a 1x7 male header (2.54mm pitch) for JTAG.
Thoughts
Although the computing power specifications seems outdated w.r.t the amount of processing power & RAM, it still can handle a lot of computing loads along with the IO pins which are plentiful for many applications.
The modern BCM2710A1 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 clocking at 1 GHz whereas the BCM2835 on the Raspberry Pi Zero W contains a single-core, 700 Mhz ARM11 processor.
Example
For example, running a headless server and adding IOT capabilities will make it into a great bridge between a full fledged home computer, with other seriously limited and cluttered individual IOT modules.
Reality
Although the modern Home Automation systems cannot be implemented on it, it can still do take a decent load if you already have it with you or getting it cheap and good enough for your needs. Many a times, the full fledged home automation system could be something that could go unutilized on its full potential and this could fill in that gap.
Conclusion
We at Ganaka Labs, are building a light weight generic automation system with a headless Linux running simple webserver, with lightweight database server for local data storage and yet capable of handling many sensors, actuators, switches, etc. Stay in touch here for further updates.