First Steps With the Raspberry Pi 241
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small, capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise." Beyond praise, though, this article details the hooking-up and mucking-about phases, and offers some ideas of what it's useful for.
Still don't get the point (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not install Python on whatever computer is already around the house? Or Scratch? Or have them write JavaScript in the browsers they already use? I think that would be a more effective way to introduce them to computer programming.
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Being out of stock for weeks on end (Score:2)
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First run was certainly oversubscribed - hope the demand stays high and it evolves a big support community like BeagleBoard. Hopefully in a few years Broadcom will come out with the next gen chip that will enable closer to Core2 performance at a sub $50 price point - and the Pi community will make it a more painless upgrade than Beagle to Panda...
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No, you make a good point (Score:4, Interesting)
I see what you are saying. Learning computers? Ok, let's look at RasPi:
RasPi: $25. Monitor: About 100. Mouse/keyboard: 20 or so. Power supply: 5. Speakers: 5. SD card: we'll say about 20. So we're talking about $175, total for a 700 Mhz machine. I'll bet you could do as well on Craigslist looking for used laptops.
I think the "thing" with RasPi is its hackability. Sure, you could learn to program on any capable machine. But this thing has...other applications. It's small. Embedded small. And very capable. And has lots of exposed I/O which a laptop wouldn't have. This is a device to inspire future geeks, not teach the masses how to program. I think that's the idea.
Honestly the first things I thought when I heard of this project were all pretty black-hat, I must admit. A nifty little proxy you could hide in a wall at a college dorm or computer lab. Or little dinky tor nodes hidden around third world countries. Or stick it in an Altoids tin with a battery near a public wifi spot and have it bittorrent things for you. Or a dinky little sniffer you could leave somewhere strategic running Aircrack or Wireshark and pick up later. Not that I'd do any of these things, or would advocate such, of course, oh heavens no. But you have to admit...a fully capable computer of this size and price - there are a lot of naughty things you could do with it. With nearly zero consequences. Twenty five bucks isn't a lot to gamble.
I think that's the gist, honestly. It's like an arduino on steroids. A little tiny Rorschach test. When you look at it what do you see? What can you make it into?
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OLPC targeted Africa/India/Brazil, etc. Pi is targeting Bristol/Sussex/North Hertfordshire... no shortages of electricity, or even old cast-off computer junk like keyboards and monitors.
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Re:Still don't get the point (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was growing up, I had access to labs full of TRS-80 computers, for a couple of hours a week. One summer, I had access to an HP something or other with a nice 320x240 graphic display for a couple of hours a day for a few weeks.
When I got my own computer, I had access during every hour of free time I cared to spend with it for several years.
It's the difference between exposure and immersion. Lance Armstrong probably wouldn't have developed into as strong a cyclist as he is if he could only ride for one hour once a week during school.
Re:Still don't get the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely this. The point of the Pi isn't that computers are inaccessible to these children, it's that they can have one each to play around with at their own speed.
While most of the devices will probably just collect dust, there'll be some kids who'll go crazy with the things. Break the OS? Really quick to reimage the SD card. Break the device? Cheap enough to get a new one. Its theirs to play with, and theirs to break.
"Spare monitor" == "TV" (Score:2)
Yes, they've typically got a television at home. And a keyboard, mouse, and USB hub cost $5 each.
SoC datasheet? (Score:3)
Is the Broadcom datasheet freely available for the SoC? In my experience, Broadcom is evil when it comes to forking over the exact specs and interfacing requirements for its chips. If there's no datasheet for the SoC, then my enthusiasm for tinkering with one of these is basically nil. Still a neat little gadget, I suppose.
Re:SoC datasheet? (Score:5, Informative)
there u go
http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-43016/l/broadcom-datasheet-for-bcm2835-soc-used-in-raspberry-pi
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Your experience probably doesn't include the Pi, then. Broadcom has been pretty decent with the Pi developers.
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But the GPU is still very closed, right? I want to have a look at the graphic driver blob as soon as I get mine.
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Check the Pi site blogs, I'm not interested in diving that deep, but I've skimmed a few blog posts that talk about better than usual access to the GPU details - not Nirvana, but at least there's a community organizing the scraps that are available.
Cloud computing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Make your own secure file repository, joining the cloud computing revolution?
Last I checked, that's called a file server. Not the "cloud computing revolution."
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Coverage (Score:2)
The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage
No kidding? (24 articles on /. ... [slashdot.org])
HDMI and DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
This device has HDMI output, but now I've heard too often here on /. how HDMI is seriously DRM-encumbered.
There is a lot of protected content out there, and there are too many horror stories how HDMI devices don't want to talk to each other or give degraded video etc. My TV doesn't have HDMI (it's too old); a new one probably will. But I'm really worried about all these stupid restrictions being put on the system. And as such am not really eager to start using HDMI.
Now a device like this is likely not to ha
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HDMI supports HDCP but it is not mandatory. That said, this is only the video portion of HDMI which is signal compatible with DVI. There are no DRM concerns here, they are simply using a commonly available socket.
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The FAQ states that audio over HDMI is supported. ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs [raspberrypi.org] about halfway down.)
The bigger picture (Score:4, Informative)
I think many people here are forgetting a few important things about the Pi...
- Linux vs Android : I've had a few Android devices now - none of which have the functionality and ease of use compared to a Linux device, all the way from a Linux Modem or VoIP system to the back end of an ESXi cluster (or vSphere or whatever they call it these days), for someone with a decent understanding of Linux/Unix varieties the Raspberry Pi is the obvious solution. Entire companies have ran on server's that have less grunt than a Pi and now its all been reduced down to the size if a phone... AND
- Power Consumption (and price) : 3 watts at peak usage.... 3 watts!!! Does this mean that I can just use 4 x AA rechargable batteries and a 30cm (12") x 30cm Solar panel and run it forever (or until the batteries need replacing)? Maybe put a small panel on the parcel shelf in your car so your CarPC is always running and ready to go? How about something more critical like medical equipment which can have sensors plugged into the GPIO and use solar/wind/batteries to monitor patients in poor areas? No other commercially available system in the past has had this much CPU Power/Ram with such little energy consumption and price, citizens of 3rd world countries might have a chance to "own" a computer and, even better - its open source - which will boost Linux usage worldwide and take a market share from the big players like Apple and Microsoft.
- Size : And weight. It wont be too long until we see computers like this embedded into clothing and other parts of every day life, and the Pi is just the start of that, as tech gets smaller and cheaper, we'll be able to product it in abundance - data for example - we went from trading Floppy Disks, to Harder Small Floppy Discs, to CD's, and hard drives, to DVD's and now its time for solid state joy, what next? Trading complete plug in system.....
- Autoplay? Screw that... for $50-$100 my cost, I can now give a customer a box and all they need to do is plug in HDMI and turn it on, it will give a full length video presentation on any screen or TV with HDMI in, with a keyboard and mouse you can give them a fully interactive product to play with, and with a wifi adapter and internet access you could use the box as a tech support node in their office, add a camera you have a portable video conferencing screen.
- Hmm I might want Autoplay (Annoying Customers) : You know, the type that harass you on how to play their mp4 rip of Game of Thrones, generally family members and friends that charging a decent rate to help would make you look like an ass so you do it for free to be nice? They will be a thing of the past, you can give them a box that plugs into their TV - which they plug *THEIR* USB stick into, and it will play almost any format with an easy to use menu. I'm no economist but I predict the savings and health costs purely because of this will be in the billions.
People need to stop being so obsessed with having the fastest and greatest and look at what they can do now. I paid almost $2000 for a Dual Celery 466 with 256 meg ram, 18 gig 7200 rpm HDD and a Voodoo 3, now days a $50 card would eat it alive and use 1/200th of the energy. In a time when the world is having an energy crisis this kind of thing is kind of important. I run my laptop, stereo and lighting in my smoking/drinking room on 12v batteries (also preparing for zombies), and once we get decent USB LED projectors, the Pi is going to be the main part of it all.
fuck I feel old now /rant...
I like my RaspPi (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been playing with my Raspberry Pi today (just twiddling with 'ncurses' under C). I see it being excellent for learning it is perfect as the standard reference platform for a lot of CS courses from "Introduction to Programming" up - but maybe a bit out of it's depth at OS the design level.
For around the same cost as a text book everybody it ensures that everybody will have the same hardware, the same OS with all the same toolsets. This will avoid the "Jimmy owns a Mac, and I have 32 bit XP, and Bob has an Android tablet" problem. As a bonus it also has zero product licensing issues...
Sure, you wouldn't want to compile a big project on it, but for anything you would do in school it would be fine.
Pi is the new wok (Score:3)
In the 80s (or was it the 70s) there was a craze to get people cooking with chinese woks. Basically, they were just frying pans and were promoted for making stir-fry food (other uses are available: satellite dish, giant saucer).
Because of the publicity and cheap prices they were popular for a time. Lots of people bought one - or were given one. There were books published on the back of that popularity. However, after a brief trial most woks ended up in the graveyard of kitchen gadgets; the cupboard under the sink.
The Pi is going through the same phase. It's received massive (in the geek world, at least) publicity - enhanced by its scarcity: an accidental piece of marketing genius, given that many better alternatives exist. The "buzz" around it is truly amazing and lots of people either have bought one or are waiting to order one. However, I haven't actually seen anything that anyone has made using a Pi.
Mine arrived a few days ago and it's like going back to the 1990's so far as having to futz around to get it to do anything useful. The Linux implementations for it are poorly documented, incomplete and lack features. I'm sure that most people, once they get past the novelty of connecting a naked circuit-board to their TVs and realising it's too slow to play videos, too limited to surf the internet and too lacking for games, flash and anything else except terminal-level programming that it, too will end up in the cupboard under the sink, next to the wok.
Re:The point? (Score:5, Insightful)
A "cheap china-sourced device" smartphone would not do these things for me:
- Media Centre PC.
- MAME box capable of hooking up to my TV.
- Learning tool for programming, networking, and other computing stuffs (that is also incredibly easy to reformat if you balls anything up).
- Have GPIO ports so I can use it for some silly robotics/mechatronics projects.
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Except for the last point ( thus my statement about external usb ) you can get all the above. HDMI output to your tv, bluetooth keyboards and mice. I am assuming you get an android phone here, and not a chinaOS type.
Now space might be an issue for your 'media' since you are limited to flash cards, but you can always stream from a file server over wifi..
Restoring firmware is pretty trivial too.
Re:The point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could you actually find me a smartphone with HDMI out (1080p), ability to use USB peripherals, and cost within 3x as much as the RPi?
Space is something I wouldn't bother comparing because I would stream to my RPi as well.
Restoring firmware on the RPi is a matter of formatting the SD card, most phones are quite easily permanently bricked.
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Just do some shopping out on the china wholesale sites for what you want, there are plenty of them out there. Some are stupid expensive, others are reasonable.
I had forgot to include small tablets as well, while they are bigger than a PI they also give one more local display ability, which for some projects might be an advantage... 70 bucks for a 7 or 8 in tablet with HDMI and usb host ports is not out of the question. I fully admit that battery life will suck, but an external PS takes care of that problem
Re:The point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The point? (Score:5, Interesting)
1080p output on $99, 4" cell phones is only a few years away. If not new, then through the used/craigslist channels. It's too bad the OLPC project didn't invest more heavily in cell phones.
This 4th of july I'll be launching an old blackberry curve a couple hundred feet in the air using fireworks simply because it's worth more to me as a disposable video camera than anything else. In 2008 that phone cost $250 with contract.
Honestly these near-daily advertisements for sub-cellphone hardware on slashdot are getting tiring.
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This 4th of july I'll be launching an old blackberry curve a couple hundred feet in the air using fireworks simply because it's worth more to me as a disposable video camera than anything else. In 2008 that phone cost $250 with contract.
And then you got another $250 phone with contract, and then another $250 phone with another contract. That's the real reason your BB curve isn't worth much to you. Not because it's not a useful device, but because you were conned into buying a new phone you didn't actuall
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Could you actually find me a smartphone with HDMI out (1080p), ability to use USB peripherals, and cost within 3x as much as the RPi?
I don't know why you'd want a smartphone for a media PC though. Those aren't capable enough for the job. But my Galaxy Tab has HDMI out. Never needed it, but it's there and I have the cable and the stand.
Some tablets have USB host mode, other don't. Choose one that fits your needs. If you have USB host then you have all other peripherals, including the GPIO and JTAG and s
Re:The point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Learning should not be done on a minimalistic system. It simply isn't worth it. Get an old PC for that. You don't want your learning to be constrained by irrelevant factors such as lack of RAM or poor performance or insufficient disk space or unavailable libraries. Get a PC, load a development system and install every development package under the Sun. Your task would be to learn how to code in $foo, not to discover problems with interpreter of $foo on architecture $bar. It is not always easy even for experienced coders to port an already working software from the development system into the embedded target.
I think you're missing the point somewhat. The PC is a heterogenous environment, so you will always have to deal with funny little quirks of compatibility in libraries etc. It's only when you get a homogenous, uniform environment that you stop having to work your way around machine-specific problems.
No, not everything is available on the Raspberry Pi... yet. Yes, someone has to port it. But that's the job of the early adopters, and it only needs done once, and then it is available to everybody.
By the time the first in-a-case Pi comes out, there will no doubt be a hell of a lot of stuff available for it.
The secondary effect will be that there will be better software coverage for all variants of ARM Linux, and Linux users will be able to start migrating away from the Linux i386 and x64 architectures. I've been waiting a long time for desktop Linux to cease to be a PC OS, as it limits its appeal. A desktop ARM Linux would be in direct competition with dumb terminals in the enterprise, and would offer the added bonus of being able to do mixed-mode local and network computing -- maybe they'd still want to use Microsoft Office remotely rather than LibreOffice locally, but they could use Firefox locally without bother.
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Except for the last point ( thus my statement about external usb ) you can get all the above. ...
Now space might be an issue for your 'media' since you are limited to flash cards, but you can always stream from a file server over wifi..
Actually, people have hacked together usb host mode drivers for the USB chips in the samsung galaxy s and galaxy s ii phones (and probably others), so there now exists the potential to plug in usb hubs, usb drives etc. into the smartphone, solving the space for media issue, and also the gpio port issue, if you buy a usb to gpio interface adapter.
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There's nothing to hack; the Galaxy SII has USB host mode out of the box.
Different markets (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed - if you want a Pi that also has camera, GPS, wi-fi, 3G radio, mic, speaker, LED light, touchscreen, keyboard, battery, and a case, I've bought Android phones as cheap as $29 off-contract. They make fantastic do-anything devices, from remote cameras to GPS trackers, and all you have to do is download an app off the Market. There are also Android SoCs in a USB/HDMI stick for excellent prices.
But if you want a hobbyist device with USB, GPIO & ethernet that you can build a project around, the Pi is a great device to play with. Pre-built phones may be more capable, but they're also less flexible in many ways.
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Insightful)
For hobbiest devices we have Arduino on the low end and PandaBoard on the high end. Where does Raspberry Pi fit into the hobbiest space? I suppose I can understand why someone would choose Raspberry Pi over PandaBoard -- the price is over $100 less! Why would I want to build my latest project with a Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino?
I'm thinking of 1080p video out for my next project, how's that work on Arduinos?
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No need to be rude -- I'm only asking what's the draw for Raspberry Pi. So it's the video? That's the point -- it's a cheap system with decent video capabilities? Help me out here. The APC [apc.io] is coming out next month and it has higher specs, but only 720p video and it's $49.
So what kind of project do you need a cheap system and 1080p video for? I'm really only asking because I'm curious. What sort of project is it?
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Interesting)
Alarm clock - plays a night sky, maybe with very quiet crickets, and progressively turns up the audio/visual stimulation as time to get up approaches.
Stick a Pi into a spare port on a TV... for the deluxe model, the Pi could also switch the TV on and off.
Please, make one for me and save me the trouble... guys like this can probably source the video content:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r8NE4osAYA [youtube.com]
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Insightful)
For a lot of people it will be about the community. You know the Pi will have a huge community that will offer a lot of additional options.
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Informative)
So, you ask "what kind of project do you need a cheap system and 1080p video for?" Believe me, if I fry the hardware, I'll be glad it's built cheap. I'd rather fry a Pi than an Arduino. That's the whole point of the Raspberry Pi: a system that won't set back an experimenter (or a kid's parents) big money if somebody's voltage calculations were wrong.
As someone below points out, it also makes better sense for schools: for a student taking an electronics course, having parents pay a $35 deposit on an RPi (refunded at the end of the year) makes for a lower entry barrier than a >$150 deposit on (name your other device).
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I would like to build a custom-soldered board with LED's. I know that I may do something wrong, and overload the GPIO pins on the Pi.
I'd rather fry a Pi than an Arduino.
Get an Arduino with a socket. Replacement chips are about $3 each...
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Interesting)
You can even write code for the Arduinos on the Pi itself [homelabs.org.uk] if you're so inclined.
(Kind of ridiculous for heavyweight embedded purposes, but could be good for kids playing around with hardware.)
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Interesting)
No need to be rude -- I'm only asking what's the draw for Raspberry Pi.
How about 256MB of RAM and an ARM11 processor (many times faster than the arduino) running a full blown Linux OS. With the Raspberry Pi, you have a chance at using things such as OpenCV + cheap webcam for your projects.
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One thing I'd like to do is to have OpenRADIUS running on a Pi. I'm concerned whether if a Pi has the horsepower for it, much less an Arduino.
Re:Different markets (Score:4, Informative)
Why would I want to build my latest project with a Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino?
It's very near the same price and has vastly more RAM and processing power, not to mention I/O.
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How full-featured is that Arduino? Last I checked a decent unit was more like $17 which is a lot closer to $25.
Re:Different Arduino models (Score:2)
The big differences between Arduinoish models are mainly
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Informative)
The two just don't compare well.
Repeating yourself doesn't make your statement true. I have an STK500 and an STK600 in the closet next to me, and a number of AVR devices and a couple Arduinos. I can still see that at some point, some projects will run off the end of Arduino and right onto the beginning of R-Pi.
They're nothing like PC's, and the Raspi is not really like an Arduino.
It is like an Arduino in certain significant ways (low price, GPIO) which make it suitable for many tasks for which people would like to use Arduno but they can't because it doesn't have enough horsepower. In that way, it is very like Arduino, but better. One of the best things about Arduino is standardized libraries.
On the other hand, it doesn't have near as much connectivity as an Arduino. I suspect that a lot of people using Arduino for their projects and running out of processing power will turn their Arduino into an interface device and switch to doing their processing on the R-Pi. At these prices it makes complete sense... for prototyping, or just banging out a quick tool. Sometimes saving the time is worth the money.
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Interesting)
But how much is an Arduino with ethernet and SD card storage? To name but a few features. (The answer is $13 + $40 + $25, that's $78 total, nowhere near $25 for a Pi model B)
Can I run an Apache server on that Arduino? Can I program it in PHP/Python/Perl etc, etc. Because I can with the Pi. (I own both)
An Arduino is a great device that can beat a Pi in many applications, but the same goes the other way around.
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Interesting)
Arduino Ethernet: my little HTTP server is utterly idiotic, waiting for a blank line followed by a newline then assuming a GET and spamming out data streamed in from the Micro-SD card. I even managed to run as far as a 64-byte buffer to speed up transmission to numerous kilobytes per second. 2KiB RAM, 32KiB flash program memory. (The microcontroller can't run code from the SD card without somehow reflashing itself.) The SD card library takes a big chunk of the RAM and flash. Interfacing a 3.3v serial JPEG camera (for taking a year-long timelapse, one shot a minute) was piss-easy, with the Arduino bit-banging serial on some of its GPIO. An analogue-to-digital converter allows a CdS cell as a light meter, also ridiculously easy to interface. Lives on a breadboard, held together with Blu-Tack.
Raspberry Pi: I've got Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 (stop laughing) and PHP 5.4 (ditto) chuntering away quite happily. Installing APC [wikipedia.org] seriously improved page load times - currently set to a 32 megabyte cache. 256MiB RAM, 8GiB flash. I even had it loading the test version of my blog-thing running on the Pi in Midori, a modern graphical browser running on the Pi. GPIO is much more fragile, and libraries and kernel support really isn't done yet.
In other words, they're in very different worlds. They're very likely to complement each other, though...
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you want Networking?
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9026 [sparkfun.com] It is more expensive than a Pi.
Wifi? Bluetooth? Well USB dongles can add that to the Pi.
Want to do your development on the board without a PC? A Pi with a Keyboard and Monitor will do that.
Want to play Audio? Here is a kit for you.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/94 [adafruit.com]
Want to develop using Python, Ruby, Basic, Smalltalk, Lua, Perl, Lisp Scheme, Erlang, or Haskell? If it is an interpreted language then it may just be a compile away for the Pi.
There are all sorts of options the pi opens up.
The Arduino is great because of the broad support and community. It is early days with the Pi still but the idea of using Smalltalk for an embedded device interests me a lot.
Re:Different markets (Score:5, Informative)
That very strongly depends on the nature of your project. Arduinos are great for nice, accessable, GPIO twiddling and some light sampling. In the hands of people who actually know their microcontroller-fu, you can also wring some surprising calculation power out of them.
For connected applications, though, their weaknesses become apparent fairly quickly. As a slave peripheral? No problem. One or two other devices over TTL serial, custom protocol? Fine. Ethernet(wired or otherwise): There's a shield for that, and it'll set you back as much as the board it connects to. Fantastic.
That's the trouble with some of the Arduino 'ecosystem' stuff. At heart, it's still based around a microcontroller. Nothing wrong with that, microcontrollers are exactly what the doctor ordered for all sorts of applications; but it makes bolting certain functions (ethernet, any serious level of video, USB host capabilities, etc.) fairly clunky and expensive. There is practically nothing that some clever person hasn't managed to encapsulate as a TTL or SPI-interface shield object that exposes some capabilities to the arduino and does a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes; but most such shields are easily as powerful as the Arduino itself, and the cost can mount fast.
Assuming(and this is important, one of Arduino's great strengths is that even n00bs can just dive in) that a reasonably sane default-beginner's-image-and-utilities emerges for the Pi, it is arguably well placed as the answer to anything where the problem requires adding frankly excessive shields to an arduino. It still has some GPIO twiddling capability; but also comes with ethernet, USB host, and video out for ~2x what an arduino would cost. As a 'desktop' the feeble main processor largely dooms it; but it's luxury by microcontroller standards and easily enough for all sorts of light web-enabling stuff.
The PandaBoard, of course, is largely the Pi without some of the compromises. More money, more power.
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The difference is that the raspberry pi is/will be immensely popular. There will be a huge community supplying software solutions and hardware modifications for it. It doesn't matter that some random china-device has twice the power and a touchscreen when you're stuck on Android 2.1, closed kernel, and no updates in sight.
It's the people that matter, not so much the hardware.
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most people don't know how to count. What do you expect?
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Both suppliers are worldwide. Simply order one... although that will involve a waiting list at this point
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A real American would want Apple Pi.
Re:A more important question... (Score:4, Interesting)
"As a resident of the USA, how can I get one of these things?"
Wait a month and get a Via APC [tomshardware.com] instead.
For $14 more than the Pi, you get twice as much RAM, a better operating system (a flavor of Android 2.3), a better CPU, 2GB of on board flash for your OS (and of course it has the obligatory MicroSD slot as well), plus standard VGA and HDMI out, 4 USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, and standard audio in/out jacks.
The video probably isn't quite as good as the Pi (it maxes at 720p), but who is going to be doing sophisticated video with these devices anyway, at this stage? It's a hobbyist board.
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Vehement agreemsg. The RAM is really the compelling part. I'd like to know if I will need a scan converter or if it will do composite out on the VGA port, though. I actually need composite for my application.
Is the OS entirely on SD cards? (Score:2)
One cool thing about the Raspberry Pi is that the OS is entirely on the SD card, so if you want to experiment with other OSs, or want to make a backup, or trash the one you're using, etc., you can just pop out the card and read it in a standard reader instead of "installing" things onto the on-board flash by negotiating with a BIOS.
If the Via APC can do this, then I'm fine with you calling Android a better OS, because you can easily replace it if you don't like it. If not, then it's much more limited. But
Re:A more important question... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A flavor of Android 2.3 is better then Debian???
If you only speak Java.
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It will run Debian almost immediately. Betcha a dollar.
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Possibly, but it'll be slow as hell unless it includes drivers for the GPU which, very often, if it runs Android to start then Xorg compatible drivers will be nigh upon impossible to actually get.
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For somethings yes. You will have an instant base of apps including games. Things like Pandora, Rdio, Spotify, and so on.
For somethings no. No Apache, no perl, no emacs, no vim, and so on.
I till all depend on what you want to use it for.
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If it were a more standard flavor of Linux, like a regular Debian kernel, I'd definitely prefer it over Android.
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You're in luck - the Debian image is currently the recommended one on the downloads page [raspberrypi.org].
(I've no idea what the 'official' educational version will be running, but from the distributions I've played round with so far, Debian is probably the most complete. Although I have switched to the go-faster-stripes Raspbian [raspbian.org], which is very similar from a usage point of view.)
Re:A more important question... (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people are buying the Pi to run XBMC. Since it can support 1080p flawlessly and the Via APC cannot, well... for many people the choice is obvious.
With any luck, the (relatively) open nature of the Pi and increasing size of the community will make it a more interesting option than competing boards, which is the reason why the Arduinos are still very popular despite being outclassed hardware-wise by other boards.
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"A lot of people are buying the Pi to run XBMC. Since it can support 1080p flawlessly and the Via APC cannot, well... for many people the choice is obvious."
That's true and for that specific use, it may be fine. But from the reviews I have seen so far, just about any video processing other than playback is out of the question.
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No GIPO headers which is going to be an issue for some uses.
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Android? Better than Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/etc?
You're either a fanboy, a Google employee, or utterly unfamiliar with how limiting and inflexible the Android platform is.
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"Android? Better than Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/etc?"
If you can get a more-or-less vanilla version of any of those to run on a Pi, then money and fame are probably yours.
Apparently Pi can't do it. [computeractive.co.uk]
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A vanilla version compiled for ARMv6 will run, yes. Those are, of course, pre-prepped images ready to dump straight to an SD card and boot. There is nothing terribly fancy going on here as Fedora and Ubuntu run on the device readily, once you toss in the firmware blob for the GPU and the driver packages (just like any other distro.)
At which point you get everything available to any common Linux platform.
Whereas with Android you get a platform that shares nothing but a kernel with the rest of the world, usin
Re: (Score:2)
If they were doing that, I have to wonder why they bothered with the Arch Linux at all.
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Newark (US branch of Farnell)... (Score:2)
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I ordered on "launch day" - just got my tracking number. At one point I thought I'd have one by the end of 2011, it's June 2012 and still not here yet.
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I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops. [hylobatidae.org]
(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian [raspbian.org] project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)
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I don't feel scammed... this is pretty typical early release delay - could have gone faster, almost never does.
Connect to NTP before writing mtime (Score:2)
alarms (which I'm still not sure what those are)
Ability to wake up at a scheduled time is important for a DVR, which needs to be able to wake up and record video at a scheduled time.
keeping track of time when the computer is off
That's the big one. Otherwise, you're going to have to be able to connect to an NTP server before you write to any file so that you can know what the last modification time is going to be.
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" The simple reason the Raspberry Pi has no RTC, is that the chip and battery would have doubled both the PCB size, and the price"
Doubled the PCB size? really?
A CR2032 lithium coin battery, a tiny 8 pin IC and a 32KHz watch crystal is hardly the size of a credit card.
And the price? In quantity, a couple of dollars for the lot.
Re: (Score:2)
A couple dollars in singles, way less in quantity.
They could just leave two contacts for the battery if they didnt want to deal with it. Seems kind of surprising to me that a SoC doesn't have built-in RTC... Perhaps it does, and they just neglected to make pads for a battery.
Re:Real Time Clock Question (Score:4, Interesting)
The uptime on mine is over a week and it's still showing the correct time. Actually, an especially correct time - I haven't got round to changing it from BST to PDT.
(My internal body-clock still runs on British Time, unfortunately.)
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But your SBCs don't have a development community forming around them - the hype and hoopla is exactly what is noteworthy. Just like the Arduino community, couldn't make me yawn any wider, but it's important because help is there for people who need it.
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" people like me who have actual real uses for the damn things are now forced to buy other similar picoITX embedded systems."
That word 'forced'.
I dont think it means what you think it means.
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Well I have been holding off on a project at work waiting on this thing, and now that its finally "available" I cant get it, I have a red line pressed against me and while I and the bosses are extremely patient, at some point you just got to move on
That time for me was April 24th 2012 at 3PM when I got asked "when are you going to do something about the environmental chamber controls?" 1 order from minibox and a few days later we all scratched it off our list.
PI - 1
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Well I have been holding off on a project at work waiting on this thing, and now that its finally "available" I cant get it, I have a red line pressed against me and while I and the bosses are extremely patient, at some point you just got to move on
That time for me was April 24th 2012 at 3PM when I got asked "when are you going to do something about the environmental chamber controls?" 1 order from minibox and a few days later we all scratched it off our list.
PI - 1
So... let's get this straight... A device is released to the public at low margins by a non-profit for the purposes of education, and you're complaining that you couldn't get ahold of one for a commercial project? I think your definition of "people ... who have actual real uses for the damn things" is a bit skewed. There were already perfectly appropriate products for your needs on the market.
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I don't think it's an unfair assessment to say that many or even most of the R-Pis sold so far are going to wind up in the bottom of a crap drawer. Not soon, because anyone who gets bored with them soon can put them on eBay and recoup their cost or even make money, but eventually...
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Arduino doesn't fit the bill for you? Comes with all kinds of extension boards, too.
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it does in some situations, I currently have a few + many AVR boards that I have made up for different tasks, but in this situation I need to monitor AND interact with many PLC controllers, beefy cpu, linux + touchscreen is ideal and I already found it for 110 bucks at minibox.com
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'Apple' is not a food name.
Steve and Steve named it after a record company.
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Okay so you are bragging about stealing somebody else's much sought after early delivery, maybe a child's since it is an educational product, and proud about how much you scalped them for it?
I don't get the world anymore. The Raspberry Pi is way more powerful than the Apple ][ I got when I was 13 and that changed my life!
So fuck you!