Raspberry Pi

Notmyrealname

mikey72 wrote: »

You might have been done there.
"The Raspberry Pi you’ll be buying in January (or by auction later this month if they all work as they should)"

Raspberry aren't taking orders yet.

Good toy to play with though.

Raspberry are taking pre-orders through certain channels not open to the public. I put my order in via a BAe engineer I know.

I can't wait. The fact it runs Linux is a real boon and makes the possibilities of all kinds of mad electronics projects actually able to come to fruition. Its far easier to knock up a programme than to fanny around with PICs. You could design a very sophisticated home control or automation system and the main controller is under £40!

What does worry me is the concern I share with Bogtrotter. Even though its idea is to teach kids, sadly those doing the teaching aren't going to be up to the task. The teachers who taught me with the EMMA II have retired. The people who see the opportunity in the Pi are my age. My kids generation would have little interest at all and no imagination of what they could do with it and seem to have little interest in learning which is partly down to the way schooling is done nowadays where you're spoonfed to pass rather than taught to learn how to find out for yourself.

mikey72

Notmyrealname wrote: »

Raspberry are taking pre-orders through certain channels not open to the public. I put my order in via a BAe engineer I know.

I can't wait. The fact it runs Linux is a real boon and makes the possibilities of all kinds of mad electronics projects actually able to come to fruition. Its far easier to knock up a programme than to fanny around with PICs. You could design a very sophisticated home control or automation system and the main controller is under £40!

What does worry me is the concern I share with Bogtrotter. Even though its idea is to teach kids, sadly those doing the teaching aren't going to be up to the task. The teachers who taught me with the EMMA II have retired. The people who see the opportunity in the Pi are my age. My kids generation would have little interest at all and no imagination of what they could do with it and seem to have little interest in learning which is partly down to the way schooling is done nowadays where you're spoonfed to pass rather than taught to learn how to find out for yourself.

Looks like you'll beat me to one then!

If the io is good enough, I reckon they'll be ok with robotics, and real applications.
Our generation were happy to make leds flash, and switch lights up and down by writing a dimmer program for a pic.

Kids imaginations now are bigger and better, they'll only be impresed if they can shake hands with the robot arm, or interact with the robot mouse in the maze. But as you can buy the robots for a few more pounds, it should be good enough.


I suppose it depends on the area you're in though, I agree some areas it's harder to inspire kids in than others.

mr_fishbulb

I've been watching videos of this today. It does look impressive, and got my geeky juices flowing.

I can imagine there would be quite a few penetration test options you can do with it.

cit_k

The first big mistake is not open sourcing the design so others can make them.

The second big mistake, is the lack of on board i/o, it should be packed full of i/o ports etc.

The third big mistake, is concentrating on the gaming aspect of it, ie the HDMI output, as your moving into the realms of third party apps to control the graphics, and moving away from pure programming, so defeating the point.

The fourth big mistake is a lack of a case, it wont last 5 minutes in a school enviroment before some kid shorts it out.

But, if I my brain had its old capabilities back, I would be longing for one none the less.

fwor

As they say themselves, they had to make choices on what interfaces to include, which others may not agree about.

1. I can't blame them for wanting to protect their IP. The BBC micro wasn't open sourced and IIRC was only made by Acorn, but it was still pretty successful.

2. They are trying to make it down to a price, and adding loads of I/O won't help that. If you need I/O, isn't that what the GPIO port and Gertboard add-on are for?

3. I'm not sure what alternative they had to HDMI and composite video. You can derive DVI from HDMI, and VGA is pretty much obsolete now.

4. They've already said they are working on putting a case into production. They are simply too small an outfit to do everything at once.

S0litaire

cit_k wrote: »

The first big mistake is not open sourcing the design so others can make them.

Think they are open sourcing some of the info (as much as they can) once it's released.

cit_k wrote: »

The second big mistake, is the lack of on board i/o, it should be packed full of i/o ports etc.

That's what the GPIO pins and JATG are for (you just have to add the pins yourself.

cit_k wrote: »

The third big mistake, is concentrating on the gaming aspect of it, ie the HDMI output, as your moving into the realms of third party apps to control the graphics, and moving away from pure programming, so defeating the point.

Think the VGA controller was a separate chip and larger socket! where as the ARM7 had inbuilt HDMI decoding (can never remember the H. number >_<) and the Socket was smaller & cheaper.

cit_k wrote: »

The fourth big mistake is a lack of a case, it wont last 5 minutes in a school enviroment before some kid shorts it out.

The first run is without a case. Once they have the kinks worked out and a new board revision they will be selling it in a case. They will need to revise the board design to accommodate mounting holes.

cit_k wrote: »

But, if I my brain had its old capabilities back, I would be longing for one none the less.

Notmyrealname

S0litaire wrote: »

That's what the GPIO pins and JATG are for (you just have to add the pins yourself.

I don't think cit_k actually looked at the thing. I had someone in another forum say the same thing so I pointed the 26 pin I/O header out to him which will be very easy to address and therefore read and write to, it being done the same way as the old EMMA II was where there will be fixed memory addresses you utilise.

jaydeeuk1

Looks bloody awesome. God fed up of waiting for the pico ITX ion boards that were announced years ago, but look over the hill and considerably more expensive now.

Wonder how quick 20 of these would be running in parallel

MoneySavingUser

anyone priced up the total cost (excluding monitor)?

Seems it will be about £16/£22 for the boards (prices are listed in $ on the site)
adding in a usb keyboard, usb power adaptor, usb hub, usb wi-fi stick, usb mouse & sd card seems to come to about £50 altogether

Notmyrealname

MoneySavingUser wrote: »

anyone priced up the total cost (excluding monitor)?

Seems it will be about £16/£22 for the boards (prices are listed in $ on the site)
adding in a usb keyboard, usb power adaptor, usb hub, usb wi-fi stick, usb mouse & sd card seems to come to about £50 altogether

But you can do it without all of those apart from the power supply and the SD card.

You only need the keyboard, mouse, USB hub and wifi stick if you're intending using it as a computer or whatever use you're going to be assigning it to needs text input or data streaming from wifi etc etc. I won't be. Mine will probably be used for a digital TV project I have in mind. I'll knock up some code for a project and it'll run that project. If I need to alter the code, I can shove the memory card in my desktop, upload rewritten code and we're away again.