Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The most common power supply is a 1 AMP power supply, which is commonly
supplied with smart phones. These chargers are made from good quality components
and can easily handle the stress of additional power or power spikes. You should also
pay attention to the USB cable that you are using. Some cables are cheaply produced
and the copper wire inside them is very thin, and so they struggle to deliver a full
1 AMP current when needed. The original cable provided with the 1 AMP power
supply works best. So, try to avoid buying cheap cables.
When you purchase a powered USB hub, they are usually supplied with a 2 AMP
power supply. This is enough to power USB devices such as a Wi-Fi adapter, a
USB hard drive, a few other peripherals, and even the Pi itself. For basic usage,
a computer's USB port will suffice, but you may experience problems. So, it is
recommended to avoid using these USBs as a power source.
SD cards may all look alike, but the actual controllers and memory chips vary in
speed. The most trusted memory cards are genuine memory cards. But be careful, as
the market is flooded with fake brands, and they usually use the slowest and cheapest
components. Some even have the incorrect size. There are various speed classes, where
Class 4 is the slowest and should be used minimally with the Pi class, and Class 10 is
the fastest. The speed of the SD card should not be treated as the main performance
gauge. Instead, we should use external storage devices such as hard drives, USB
memory sticks, or
Network Attached Storage
(
NAS
) to do intensive storage
operations. This topic assumes that you are using at least an 8 GB, Class 4, genuine SD
card. Tweaking performance requires a lot of time and is not covered in this topic. The
following figure shows an original HTC charger and cable, together with an original
Kingston 8 GB Class4 SD card that was used during the writing of this topic:
