$25 PC Prototype Gets Award At ARM TechCon 238
New submitter gbl08ma writes "The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to create a $25 Linux box, won an award for the category 'Best in Show for Hardware Design' at ARM TechCon, even though they haven't yet released any final product (the release will be sometime in late November). Eben Upton demonstrated the capabilities of one of the prototypes that have been built. From advanced graphics at 1080p resolution to simple web browsing and desktop productivity, the small boards with ARM-based processors and PoP SDRAM have proven to be very versatile, fast and durable."
First to repeat it in this story (Score:2)
The $25 pi is cool and all, but I'd find it much more interesting with WiFi and a bit more RAM.
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As mentioned below, it can play 1080P video:
video [youtube.com].
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Flash already uses this since minor versions ago.
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ARM's push for the server world will presumably make (relatively) cheap ARM boards with substantial RAM available; but until that happens, treating ARM boards like contemporary desktops just isn't going to work. They are arguably wasteful and expensive in many applications; but the x86s of the world are brutally powerful.
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but the x86s of the world are brutally powerful.
I have not one, but two Asus eee nettop machines in the house, sometimes they feel brutal to work with, but never brutally powerful, more like brutal in an obtuse, Neanderthal way. They are impressively small, quiet and power efficient, and the two of them together cost less than the bottom of the line "mini" fruity option.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The original intent of this PC is in the spirit of the VIC 20. It is a little computer for kids to hack around with. The difference between it and the VIC 20 is that it costs so little the adults won't mind if the kids hack around with it.
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From the blog, power has been confirmed to be micro USB.
So I can run it off all those cellphone charges I have around the place, or that useless USB port on the TV. Yay!
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:5, Insightful)
treating ARM boards like contemporary desktops just isn't going to work
Do I have permission to treat it as a 2002 desktop, which for 99% of the population is exactly the same as a 2012 desktop?
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Sure. 700MHz processor with 256MB of RAM is just about on the money for a 2001-2002 desktop, too. With the right OS and software that's properly designed for the system's capability, that would run quite well. That probably means you'd be using a browser like Midori rather than Firefox, but you can still quite easily shoehorn a full modern OS, complete with compositing effects, into less than that. You just need to pick the right desktop environment for the job. Heck, the laptop I'm typing this on is only u
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Consider also that the first ipad uses similar specs to this and people freaking love that thing. I don't hear anybody calling it slow.
O.K. then, listen: the iPad (one, which is the only one I have used) is slow. It frags up its memory and needs rebooting, about weekly in my experience. It is hobbled by its OS into single tasking and its apps are all vetted before release into the store, and still they get stuttery and glitchy on occasion. It does some things "supercomputer fast" if you're talking about supercomputers from the '80s, but as compared to a modern desktop system of similar price, it's a damn dog.
Most of the apps that run on
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Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
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Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
I had an 8-bit machine with a cassette drive, I well remember "less general use" machines, I also know that 95%+ of what my kids do on computers, for school or fun, runs through the web browser.
I suppose if I provided them with lame hardware that is incapable of web browsing, they might be more inclined to learn to program it, but more likely they'll just seek out some other way to get on the web and ignore the lame toy.
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I think you're still kind of missing the point of the hardware, however. From their about page:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
It's not really intended as a general consumer device, though there will be many general consumers (like me) interested. Their primary interest was bringing them into schools at a price point even poorer schools could afford for teaching computer related subjects (such as software development), and this little device will be more than suitable for this task. It just so happens the specs are good enough for there t
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:5, Insightful)
It's intended to teach computing, not to teach media consumption using a computer. Like the BBC Micro that inspired it, it's intended to have a reasonable range of I/O capabilities for controlling electronics projects and a decent programming environment. Everything else is a bonus.
When the BBC Micro started to be replaced by Archimedes machines and later IBM PCs in schools, the focus on computer education shifted away from how it works and how you can control it to using off-the-shelf packages. I was right at the tail end of that transition, and my lecturers noticed a fairly abrupt jump in the programming abilities of people who were taught with the BBC to those a few years later who were taught with PCs.
We live in a society where basic programming is as important as basic penmanship was a century ago. Most people won't become programmers, but they will need to be able to use various domain-specific languages, even if just to write office macros. Yet, during this transition, our school system has moved away from teaching programming to young children - the time when they are most receptive to it - and taught them how to use specific software packages, rather than how to understand the underlying logic behind them.
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The point is they're supposed to be disposable/breakable. Adding that much ram would increase costs and dimensions i'd bet.
You'd probably be better off buying a cheap android tablet.
Either way I these devices will be great for home automation.
Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
lights, temperatures and a lot more.
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:5, Interesting)
>Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
>lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
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>Either way I these devices will be great for home automation.
>Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
>lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
So is Arduino. Dont forget it will be on same price level as cheapest Arduino while providing tons more functionality.
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Not really. The Arduino doesn't offer a HDMI video output, but does everything else much better. Turning on a single I/O output on the Arduino is a single, straightforward, line of code, which doesn't require writing a Linux device driver. The Arduino also has ready made shields for everything you could need, and tons of example projects and documentation.
For home automation, and other hobby
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compiling a program easier than
echo -ne "\x01" > /dev/gpio/something
?
you must be special
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You're going to need a program anyway to do something useful. If you want to use this for home automation, flipping a light switch manually sure beats typing echo -ne "\x01" > /dev/gpio/something
And as soon as you start programming something more complex, it's a lot easier on the Arduino.
What if you want to hook up a HD44780 compatible LCD screen to 14 GPIO pins. Are you going to write the entire LCD driver in shell script.
Or maybe the GPIO is connected to a speaker, and you'd like to get exactly 440 Her
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You're going to need a program anyway to do something useful. If you want to use this for home automation, flipping a light switch manually sure beats typing echo -ne "\x01" > /dev/gpio/something
program a script that i can edit on a device while i debug it, without compilation on host computer and flashing EVERY SINGLE time i try something
And as soon as you start programming something more complex, it's a lot easier on the Arduino.
no its not, unless you are special
What if you want to hook up a HD44780 compatible LCD screen to 14 GPIO pins. Are you going to write the entire LCD driver in shell script.
http://lcd-linux.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
yep, you are special (man, i love ad hominem)
Or maybe the GPIO is connected to a speaker, and you'd like to get exactly 440 Hertz out of it.
its called hardware timers, confirmed by the devs as present on Rasp PI. Not to mention there is already sound output on the device so you have normal audio output instead of PC speaker equivalent.
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Sheesh! It is horses for courses...
If you want to use a consumer display, and consumer USB devices then go Raspberry Pi.
If you want to do bitbashing interfaces on an 8bit controller, go Arduino.
If you want to do real stuff, then get yourself a FPGA board :-)
I really like the Papilio One. One minute an Arduino, the next an arcade game from FPGA Arcade
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And how much work is it to port that LCD linux driver to the Raspi ? You'll need to muck with the driver to get the GPIOs connected properly, so all of a sudden you're building kernel modules with all the complications this brings.
On the Arduino, you just call Lcd.Write( "hello world" ), and use a standard LCD shield. You don't even have to worry about wiring your own connector.
Yeah. Too bad there's no datasheet of this chip. And besid
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Agreed. If you need HDMI output, Ethernet, USB, and not much else, get a Raspberry Pi. It's definitely a cool board to work as a thin media server that you can tuck behind your TV, if you don't mind the raw electronics look and a bit of hacking.
For tinkering with hardware devices where you don't need HDMI, get an Arduino board, or a cheap ARM Cortex eval board with plenty of I/O, open documentation and free tools.
For learning to use a computer, or to do any other kind of serious work or play, get a laptop,
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And how much work is it to port that LCD linux driver to the Raspi ?
zero, because its a LINUX driver for LINUX device
You'll need to muck with the driver to get the GPIOs connected properly, so all of a sudden you're building kernel modules with all the complications this brings.
On the Arduino, you just call Lcd.Write( "hello world" ), and use a standard LCD shield. You don't even have to worry about wiring your own connector.
Yeah. Too bad there's no datasheet of this chip. And besides, you're programming on top of Linux, so you're going to have to figure out how to get accurate timing in a user application through the standard means, not by directly setting up a timer interrupt (which is only a few lines of code on the Arduino).
You are hopeless. Somehow you are terrified of a real operating system + real peripherals with all the benefits they bring.
Look at OpenWRT. Rasppi will be like that, but with full OpenGL support.
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Except it doesn't use the same I/O connections.
Not terrified. Just pointing out that's it a lot more work to make simple peripherals work on a powerful SoC like this one. I've written simple Linux drivers for the OMAP, and finding out that the SoC datasheet is 3500 pages can be a bit daunting (and the OMAP actually has a free datasheet, unlike this Broadco
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Here's an example of a web server that let's you see the voltage on the analog input pins:
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/WebServer [arduino.cc]
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Please learn the difference between firmware and drivers.
Even very trivial computer hardware has some sort of microprocessor doing something in it, most likely with propriatary code. Your mouse has one. Some more complex hardware, especially GPUs, does not store it's own firmware, instead having the driver load it from the system's persistant storage at startup.
Claiming that a driver that can send the manufacturer's fir
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It ought to be pretty amazingly trivial on an Arduino that has the right hardware, actually -- but only because you can just snarf up some examples and tweak them. On the raspberry Pi you could do it with a small shell script.
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Since the point of this whole design is to learn kids about programming, wouldn't it be much better to actually pick an open CPU ?
Sure, this device lets you play a h.264 stream, 1080p, on your TV. Whoop-di-doo.. but there's nothing you can hack or investigate to understand how it works. Video data disappears into an undocumented black box, and a TV signal comes out the other end.
If you want kids to learn how to program, give them an ARM7 with a TFT panel, where they can call putpixel(x,y,col). Not nearly a
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Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I am going to be very happy with one of these and a wireless keyboard and mouse on the TV for those iIMDB moments and another on a monitor as a thin client, maybe a third with a usb disk as a storage server (100Mb wired to my router will be fine for wireless clients...
At $105 for three of them, that is a steal!
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Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.) My vision for this thing is to hang it on the back of the living room TV and use it as a computer in the living room... I currently use an eee nettop for this, but something even smaller and less power consuming would be more attractive.
And, spe
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Pay about $100 more, and you can even get a screen!
I think you are rather missing the point, which is that these are absolute dead cheap, low power devices that can do quite a lot. If you need bluetooth, Wifi, and the rest, get a cheap internet tablet (some exist ion the 100-200 dollar range). The point of these are dead-cheap, low power applications, while still having a full-on computer. I can't even think of any real applications I would use it for, but just because I can't doesn't mean a lot of Linux h
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I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.)
Do I really have to look this stuff up for you?
bluetooth dongle [dealextreme.com] for $1.86, have personally tested with Linux, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 & ultra mini 802.11b-g-n dongle [dealextreme.com], have not tested but I bet it works. For that little, indeed, I would bet. There are other options which are better-tested though, some just as tiny but with big antennas on 'em. Raspberry Pi B (the $35) version has two USB ports, so you don't need a hub. This stuff gives free shipping. DX also has a variety of USB-connectored Mini-USB po
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hang around maybe models C and D will do just that, for now A and B seem perfectly reasonable. besides dump javabloat and a machine with 256 megs does decent around the web anyway ... I do it every day
I have an iPad (not a wallet vote on my part, actually "won" it in a drawing I didn't even know I had entered), and I must say that it sucks not having flash work, especially for things that the kids use like spellingcity.com. I also have a PS3 and will not go into depth about the ways that web browsing sucks on it, even under (the now verboten) Linux. I have also used a PandaBoard as a "desktop" for a little while, I assume the Raspberry Pi will "feel" very similar - amazingly good, for what it is, but s
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First world computing is becoming disposable. Third world computing is becoming affordable, yet you're bitching that the process isn't exactly matching up to your needs.
How many people that need a $25 computer will be worried that it feels "lame when compared to a normal desktop"?
Answer: nobody.
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How many people that need a $25 computer will be worried...
How many people that "need" a $25 computer will be able to afford a monitor and keyboard, or electricity to drive it all?
Filling the "wants" of the people who can actually afford it is what marketing is about, otherwise you've got a noble product that nobody buys (i.e. a big waste of time and effort.)
I think the Pi will fill enough "wants" to not be a waste of time, I also think if they push just a little bit up-market, they can get a much larger volume, which should help with the production costs of the en
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The original OLPC sported a clockwork generator, as do emergency radios. If this prototype doesn't have that facility, then (a) it should, and (b) it's the fault of people who pestered OLPC to ditch the generator for mains power.
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I still have a problem with the notion of people who don't have internet access "needing" a computer. If you don't have mains power, then, odds are, you don't have internet access either.
I made good use of computers before there was a useful internet, but I was in a distinct minority. The "general population" didn't care much about computers until the late '90s, even if they were forced to use them for work, and I can respect their disregard of the technology, it didn't to anything relevant for them, unti
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:4, Insightful)
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What would you propose to do with it? Firefox and OpenOffice won't run. The Ubuntu LiveCD won't even run on 512MB (I found out by trial and error).
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This is the kind of shit that makes me regret signing into Slashdot.
>What would you propose to do with it? Firefox and OpenOffice won't run. The Ubuntu LiveCD won't even run on 512MB (I found out by trial and error).
We could build a thin client to remotely access your exaggerated expectations?
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Well, The iPad I am attempting to typing on has only 512MB, so I guess a Raspberry Pi will be good for nothing... ... but email, usable web browsers, nifty games, watching video, simple productivity apps....
All it takes is a little faith.
I'm also been running Linux 2.6 + busybox on a 100MHz soft processor on a FPGA with 32MB, so it can be done.
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Did you just get your first computer or something? This machine is intended as the spiritual successor of the BBC Models A and B, which had 16KB and 32KB respectively. It is intended to fulfil the same purpose. Yet, apparently, you can't do in 256MB of RAM today what we could in 32KB of RAM in 1981? OpenOffice and FireFox, ignoring the fact that they both run quite happily in 512MB of RAM - I can run them both, simultaneously, on my Efika with an 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM - are totally irrelevant
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What would you propose to do with it? Firefox and OpenOffice won't run. The Ubuntu LiveCD won't even run on 512MB (I found out by trial and error).
LiveCDs use a lot of memory. In 128MB it is totally possible to run Debian and Iceweasel and get OK performance. If you don't have lightning-fast storage, you will want to disable disk caching in firefox, because you won't have any free memory to do disk caching at the block level.
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:5, Informative)
The project's been covered on Slashdot, what, four times now? And people still don't understand what the target market is!
This is not aimed at the third world (although I am involved with a project in Tanzania that's considering using them if we can get a FreeBSD port), it's aimed at UK schools. When I went to school, we had BBC Model B computers and a couple of BBC Masters. The A and B nomenclature of the Raspberry Pi is directly inherited from the original BBC micros, because they are intended to fill exactly the same niche: teaching kids how to make computers do what they want. Modern computing in schools has drifted too far towards teaching kids to do what the computer wants.
When you turned on the BBC, you were in a programming environment. Actually a fairly powerful one: a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct memory manipulation via PEEK and POKE, and a built-in assembler (i.e. everything you needed to write a JIT compiler, although I never did).
You also had a range of I/O capabilities, including analogue input and digital input and output that could be read or written to trivially, just by reading or writing the relevant memory address. These machines had just enough abstraction that they weren't totally intimidating, but it was thin enough that you could push (POKE?) through it and see exactly how things were working. That was what made it a good teaching machine.
The original BBC Model B cost about £300, in 1981s money. Accounting for inflation, you can give every child in the class one of these to play with for the price of buying the BBC B for the classroom back in 1981.
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There's no shortage of markets for these devices. Casemodders will buy them to run secondary displays. They will make fantastic computers for cars and even motorcycles (the little one ought to be trivial to fit in someplace.) A lot of people will be able to use them as a media player, myself included -- one that makes no noise, consumes practically no power compared to the display, and can be affixed to the rear of the television with a zip tie or a paper clip. The portability means being able to take the w
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The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
So WiFi, 2GB RAM, how about built-in monitor and keyboard? And of course a trackpad and some spare USB ports on the side. It should have a built in OS, and a long-life battery as part of it too.
If only someone made such a device.
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The $35 version only has wired ethernet, and I suppose I should have been specific that I would like at least 512MB of RAM, preferably 2GB, especially when coping with a 700MHz ARM 11 as a processor. I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead of one that will always feel lame when compared to a normal desktop.
So WiFi, 2GB RAM, how about built-in monitor and keyboard? And of course a trackpad and some spare USB ports on the side. It should have a built in OS, and a long-life battery as part of it too.
If only someone made such a device.
And, you forgot, sold it for $25... I think you can actually get those on eBay, 3 year old notebooks are going cheap.
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Then why bother with this thing at all? A refurb Pentium4 PC goes for $50 shipped. This thing only makes sense if you need a super-small form factor, and even then, rooting and flashing an older Android smartphone seems like a better option to me.
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The form factor (and power factor) are both extremely attractive - I'm currently using Asus eee nettops for the purpose, and they're good, but the Pi, with a little more juice, could be better.
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Your 4 year old P4 will pretty soon cost more than the small ARM board in power, assuming you actually turn it on.
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to keep it running for an average of 10 hours a day, it will consume 365 kWh per year. Even in the USA that's $36.50 per year. In places were people don't waste energy like they own the world - devastatingly poor countries like Germany - you're talking upwards of $100 per year.
The Raspberry is using 1W at full power.
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and 41W if you include the monitor.
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128 MB of RAM should be enough for anybody.
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Monoprice has a tiny USB WiFi adapter that would be a good fit. The
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=105&cp_id=10501&cs_id=1050108&p_id=8072&seq=1&format=2 [monoprice.com]
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All valid points, and thanks for the shopping list I may well use it, but, on the other hand, I can also acknowledge the validity of the lazy point of view that each of those mix and match parts has the potential to be a giant time sink and/or waste of money and effort. Especially when playing with wireless tech, things don't always work as well as they might in your particular installation. If a system of wireless components is pre-tested and demonstrated to work... there's value in that.
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Solution.
The people that sell the Raspberry Pi simply off a tested wifi adaptor and bluetooth adaptor that is plug and play.
The target was lowest possible price. The ram can be an issue for some software like browsers and Flash "Yes I hate it as well but..". But they couldn't meet their price goal with more ram but that really should be prefaced with the word yet.
This is their first model and it is targeted at the very low end market. Give them time...
Frankly I would love to see them do something like the B
This is an enabling technology.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is going to enable so many nifty things.... Why by $400 thin clients when you can get on of these? Why replace you tv with an Internet enabled on when you can add one of these?
At $25, it may enable families in the developing world to own their own computer, or be the difference between internet access in schools or not.
I really hope this allows FOSS to release itself from winter hardware, and bring some hardware deversity into play, a true powerful, low cost, open platform.
Internet kiosks will be able to be put in unsecured enviornments and public areas... After all, it is only at most going to cost $25 if it gets trashed...
I say BRING IT ON!!!
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Only if the already have an HDMI monitor plus cable, keyboard, mouse, and a power supply. It probably also needs a case for durability.
It's probably easier and cheaper to get a netbook for $200, or a used PC.
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And when it comes down to it, the Raspberry Pi was not designed to target the developing world, but students. The goal is to replace the BBC Micro and other easily accessible PCs with something cheap enough for the student to buy (or purchased in quantity with minor outlay.)
If governments or charities in developing nations wish to supply these, they will undoubtedly be made aware of the peripheral requirements. Of course, when the PC costs a mere $25, the entire landscape changes regardless.
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The same applies to students. Do you know students that have an HDMI TV, a keyboard and mouse, and internet access, but who don't already own a PC, laptop, or smartphone ?
The fact that few students are interested in programming is not because of a lack of hardware. It's because they just don't care. When the BBC Micro came out, it was pure magic to be able to type something, and have a red triangle show up on your TV.
Nowadays, kids grow up playing Angry Birds, and a red triangle is not going to impress them
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Its design concept was for teens/preteens
"Dad! Can I use the keyboard and mouse that you use on you laptop when you are at work?, Mum, do you mind if I play with MY computer rather than watching TV after school?"
(mum and dad think: it is only $25 (less than a game), and at least he isn't mucking around on the 'real' computer...)
I can see it working. Working really well.
And I want a cheap ARM box too!
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Except that teens/preteens want to use the computer to chat with their friends, update their facebook status, and play games, and they don't want to do that on the living room floor in front of the big screen TV, where there little brother can see what they're typing. And this thing is not going to be powerful enough to run a normal web browser.
In real life, Dad is just going to say: "I'm going to buy a new laptop for myself, you can have my old one".
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Hey, if only 0.1% of the worlds population have the geek instinct, and would want to play with one of these, and 60% of the world is too rich or too poor to want one, then this product could be enabling 2,800,000 geeks to follow their dreams.
I wish them every success, I hope that you will too.
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My firefox is now running at 512MB, plus another 200MB for the flash player pluging, and this device only has 128MB (256MB for the $35 version). You may be able to run a web browser, but you won't be enjoying life very much.
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Strange, for my remote access to client networks at work I use a VM running XP with 256MB RAM, running in VirtualBox on a cast of 1GB PC running Windows 7.
Internet Explorer on that works perfectly well then managing SANs.
I think this will work just fine...
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XP is pretty light weight, which is reasonable for an OS that's a decade old. Of course, the Pi doesn't support Windows, so try installing a reasonably modern Linux distribution in 256MB (including video RAM), with Firefox + Flash, and some other applications, and using a USB thumb drive for root/swap.
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There are plenty of modern distros out there that will work quite comfortably with "only" 256Mb of ram.
And Firefox is not the be all and end all of browsing. There are faster, lighter browsers out there that could fulfil that role just as well... Practically anything using Webkit for it's engine for starters....
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I don't think that's true. I learned to program - in school - on a BBC Model B when I was 7. At the time, I could play shiny VGA graphics games at home, and even things like the NES (although based on the same CPU) were far ahead of the BBC in terms of graphics and sound. We laughed a lot at how primitive the BBC seemed.
But that red triangle? It wasn't cool because it was a red triangle. It was cool because I made a red triangle. The existence of better systems didn't take away the feeling of achieve
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I tried it with my own kids. I showed them my FPGA replica of my first 8-bit computer, and it took about 2 yawns and 1 minute before they went off to do something else.
They played with Scratch for a while, and now they're busy with Minecraft.
There are so many interactive Flash games on-line, even fairly good educational ones, like Scratch, that a red triangle isn't going to fascinate them anymore.
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The BeeBe was a bit on the expensive side. It was a very cool machine but I would say this is more like the ZX-81 if you want to keep it British or the Commodore-64. Funny thing is that this is cheaper than both of those machines.
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Well except that it doesn't have enough power to play back 1080p videos, and likely it can't even do 720p either
Uh, that'll explain the various articles about how how it's capable of playing 1080p video (via the GPU).
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It can play 1080p24 when the source stream is encoded just so. In any other case you're going to need a machine with an order of magnitude more power (or more!) to transcode the stream if you want to play it back in realtime, e.g. PS3MediaServer.
Not to take anything away from it, I want to buy at least one of each type (the skinny model would make an awesome mobile for limited-space situations... like an electric bike) but it is fairly limited in this area.
The good news is that 720p video looks pretty good
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It doe 1080p just fine. The SoC on the RaspbetrryPi is the same one that powers the Roku2. The RPI supplies a hardware accelerated OpenMax implementation. It will even come with licenses for the codecs.
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If you follow the link (I know, I know), you'll see their party trick at their trade stall was playing Avatar at 1080p.
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Well except that it doesn't have enough power to play back 1080p videos
Nope, it really can. High Profile Level 4.1 h.264, which is very impressive for a SOC.
Security (Score:2)
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oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
If you taped them all to the back of a monitor, you could pretend you bought an imac. cooool.
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Buy three and suddenly you have more RAM than an iMac.
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Buy thirty-three and suddenly you have more RAM than an iMac.
FTFY.
There's a name for that already (Score:2, Informative)
A cluster of Raspberries is called a "Bramble"
Sheesh!
Keep up, can't you?
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Well, a cluster of raspberry pies is called a local parish council fundraiser.
Open Hardware? (Score:2)
At one time I seem to remember reading that the they were going to release it under an open-hardware license similar to what Arduino does. But I can't seem to find anything about it now. Was that a marketing ploy or a figment of my imagination?
Where can I buy one? (Score:2, Troll)
I've seen this Rasberry Pi thing a few times now over the past few years and I still can't find it anywhere for sale. Vapourware?
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I've seen that site maybe 18 months ago and it seems the release date keeps getting pushed back. Loads of publicity, yes, but I'll believe it when I can buy one.
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Supposed to be coming next month... I'm not holding my breath, but I do believe it will make it out in time for Christmas.
Re:Broadcom and Open Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Funny, at my current job they knew I had never programmed for Nios, ATMega or PIC before they hired me, and I have done projects in all 3 in the last year. The four companies before that all basically asked me what I thought was the best solution to their problem and we went with that.
SCART (Score:2)
"Most TVs from the past 10 years have either SCART or composite video/audio in"
SCART still exists? That must be one of the most horrible connector standards ever.
I had a 1081 with SCART, (in 1986 it came with the Amiga 1000 )and the early 1084's also had it. Duct tape was the most common solution to try to keep it connected to the monitor
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