Martin O’Hanlon, Minecraft hacker extraordinaire, wanted to see if the Pi 2’s better CPU and upgraded memory ran a Minecraft server any better than the B+. He’s documented the procedure on his blog including how to download a vanilla server (or build your own). Take a look here.
For those of you who would like to read a single article about the Raspberry Pi 2 that explains all the hardware changes and all the expected software options (such as Ubuntu and the IOT version of Windows 10) as well as some really precise details of the design of the board, I can recommend heading over to ElectronicsWeekly.com. One of their writers, Steve Bush, has put together a really great article summing it all up. And best of all, it was written on a Raspberry Pi 2!
For those of you out there who have the Raspberry Pi B+ and have just bought a Pi 2, you will need to update your existing microSD card on the B+ before you plug it into the Pi 2. This is accomplished with a few simple commands and a bit of waiting about.
My friend Tim Richardson (@geeky_tim) has written a great, straightforward tutorial over at The Pi Hut that tells you how to do this. Head on over to The Pi Hut to read how to do it.
Carl Monk has been busy writing up a project that he has been working on. You, too, can build the DeLorean time circuitry from Back to the Future by following his in-depth tutorial full of wiring diagrams and explanations. Great stuff. Start with his introduction here. Here it is in action:
Element14 has posted a recording of Monday’s press conference on YouTube. It’s well worth a watch, if only to see how excited Eben Upton clearly is about the “New Toy”! It answers a lot of the questions about the board that you might have.
Alex Eames from RasPi.TV has written a Python script that tests out the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 2’s quad-core processor by carrying out sorting operations on a massive list of words. The results are astounding. The Pi 2 clearly beats the B+ in a single-core test and simply wipes the floor with the B+ in a multi-threaded test. You can watch a video of the test and see the code here. He’s also done some power-usage measurements to compare the Pi 2 against all the other models of Pi out there.
Alex has made the code for the multi-threaded test available on GitHub if you’d like to run it yourself or see a great example of how multi-threaded Python programming is done. Python is cross-platform, so you can try this out wherever Python can be installed!
