Raspberry Pi 2 and FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus

Folks,

Today we spent some time with the new Raspberry Pi 2 and the FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus.

As many will be aware, the original Raspberry Pi had a problem with its USB host stack, for which I released a workaround here: this simply reduced the dongle’s bandwidth so that the Raspberry Pi could keep up.

Well the good news is that the Raspberry Pi 2 so far does not seem to show the same limitation. I recorded an hour of full bandwidth this afternoon, and it plays back perfectly, which would not have happened with the original Raspberry Pi.

Talking of the Pi 2 in general, this is a very significant update. Compiling code natively on the original Pi was hard work, it was tediously slow. Frequently, you’d cross-compile, which although is frequently done, it’s hard to set up and the environment needs continually tweaking and updating. On the Pi 2 on the other hand, it’s like night and day, it’s a piece of cake to compile your code natively. I was really enjoying running both a native screen and keyboard/mouse combo together with a VNC X session simultaneously, it really is a joy to use.

Many thanks, Howard