Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Unboxing

As expected, my Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in the post during the week (in fact, two of them to be precise) to replace a long in the tooth original Raspberry Pi Model B and a fried revised Model B. I have to say, initial impressions are very positive and I’ve only mucked around with media centre solutions so far.

Anyway, here’s the unboxing video:

In terms of high level specs, the Raspberry Pi 2 has:

  • a quad-core Broadcom BCM2836 ARM CPU,
  • 1GB RAM,
  • micro SD slot,
  • 40 pin extended GPIO,
  • 4 x USB 2.0 ports,
  • 4 pole stereo output,
  • micro USB power port.

I had issues getting my preferred choice of OpenELEC installed on both RPi 2 units with all attempts running into a kernel panic of some variety. After trying five different micro SD cards (including three brand new SanDisk Ultra UHS-1 8GB cards) on two different computers to burn the images and downloading the image numerous times I gave up. This was odd given that the MD5 hash matched what was on the website but rather than sink any more time into trying to get it to work I decided to go back to RaspBMC.

I had originally used RaspBMC on my original and revised Model B units but swapped to OpenELEC after finding that it performed notably better on the same hardware. However, upon looking up RaspBMC this time around I discovered that it is becoming OSMC (which is Open Source Media Centre). Long story short, I am now running OSMC  and look forward to its continued development.

In initial testing, performance has been fast and fluid but will put Raspberry Pi 2 through its paces with some 1080p content as well as installing some add-ons to leverage the extra computing power. In the meantime, stay tuned!

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