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Raspberry Pi <3 Blender

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The Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer that runs Linux and sells for only $35. After its announcement yesterday, 10,000 of them were sold in only a couple of hours. Here are two interesting stories involving the Raspberry Pi and Blender.

Raspberry Pi demo, includes Big Buck Bunny

Blender-designed Raspberry Pi case for 3D printing

Marco Alici writes:

As soon as I came into contact with the Raspberry Pi project I thought that:

  • I’d like to have one as soon as possible;
  • I’d like to give it an attractive case.

So I designed a case to be 3D-printed (or moulded, if someone would like to invest in it), and I liked to render it in Blender2.59+Yafaray.

Here is the start, and here is the end, with the rendered images.

I’m waiting for a real 3D printed prototype from Shapeways.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

48 Comments

  1. I guess I will be running Blender on linux after all. Blender on the go.. Its going to be interesting to see how the blender community uses this..

        • Bebenstyle88 on

          Hum, it's not that simple. Blender rely on different libraries that are most likely not available for ARM. And compiling on ARM is not simple at all.

          • Campbell Barton on

             I've compiled and run blender on ARM without any problems (infact it was very simple), which libraries don't work?

    • Excuse my lack of understanding, but how exactly would this be useful
      for on-the-go modeling? You would still need a power supply, computer
      display, mouse, and keyboard to use this. Seems much easier to just use a laptop.

      •  Can't fit a laptop in my pocket & peripherals are everywhere and inexpensive. Imagine a world where your main computer is the size of a flash drive and you just clip in at any location anywhere. Toting my laptop around gets old when you can fit it in your pocket. More convenient and unlike a laptop its always with you. Personally I would take mine to work since I can't blend on a company computer. (during lunch of course) Also have not seen many 27in laptops. I would prefer the 27in real estate when I blend away from home. When traveling carrying two laptops (business and personal) is nerdy. If someone stole my $35 computer I'd just go get another one. If someone took my Macbook Air I would be mad. Put a nano projector on it and you won't need a monitor.

      • Notice the RCA out? you can connect this with virtually EVERY tv out there, no need for a monitor when you've got a tv.  Also if you do some searching you can find pocket sized projectors, roll out keyboards and virtual keyboards, to name a few. This is like a missing piece of the puzzle.

        I wonder if it will run ubuntu? It would be great to keep my workflow streamed. I manage a small video team at my church, and wanting to add another pc I've thought about bringing my main desktop here, with this I can make this my home computer, to do simple editing and internet use, and bring my main pc down to the church after all :D

    • Campbell Barton on

      most likely, though the amount of ram these have makes it unlikely to be a great solution (even if you split up the image between nodes. you need memory for geometry and textures).

  2. Peter Houlihan on

    Thats funny, I was thinking about a case last night, just one thought though: that thing has no fans, would it not interfere with cooling?

  3. This also has a graphics GPU capable of using openCL and openGL. The cycles and processing could be pushed to the GPU. You could create a parallel cluster server. The only problem would be 256mb of limited ram on the board. Hope they can figure a way to use the pinouts, if possible to get more ram for the Rasberry Pi.

    Looks intriguing...

  4. I think when it says raspberry-pi <3 Blender, they just mean this case was designed in Blender... not that you should try running Blender on it.  That would be a PITA at best. 

  5. Guys, for what it's worth, I had looked at it months ago: my idea was that if it could run the game engine, it'd a fun cheap way to push the Blender Game engine onto the masses (hook it to your TV), with the endless possiblity of downloading more games, update the engine etc.  However, I read the specs, but unlike  spfxguy, I walked away thinking IT WOULD NOT run openCL.  Maybe I'm wrong.  I hope I'm wrong.  Because there is USB port, you can envisage a cheap USB port memory extension etc..., joysticks, keyboards plugged on a USB port hub replicator.  I wish them luck, I hope this comes to fruition for the benefit of the Blender community (the raspberry maker).Arnaud

  6. I myself do not know how to do it but I can imagine a series of RPi for a render farm. As for working with Blender on a RPi. I don't think so. I mean ideally it is recommended to have 8Gig of ram specially if there's sculpting involved and I assume that fluid/particle/smoke/etc simulation are quite heavy on ram. (realistic one at least) So what is the fuss over this other than having a cheap render farm. (that said, I'd love to have my own render farm )  :)

    TheElwolf

  7. Hello, this is very interesting!

    I work for a 3d printing company: "Offload Studios" and this is one of the things we 
    specialise in. We just recently designed / printed / and made moulds for a similar
    project, (I am not at liberty to say more then that). 

    If you want to get a print through us or would like me to access your model's 
    real world feasibility, email me at: [email protected] 

    Cheers

  8. Since I can't afford a $300USD CPU at the moment I thought I could use one of those tiny computers for modeling on Blender, I can afford an ASUS Thinker Board, it haa a Rockchip Quad-Core RK3288 processor, 2GB of DDR3 and an ARM Mali-T760 MP4 GPU clocked at 600 MHz supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1, OpenCL 1.1, Renderscript and Direct3D 11.1 wich seem powerful enough to run Blender.
    Has anyone tried this little board?

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