Reply With QuoteI'll be encouraging my 11 year old son to get involved with one.
Looks like a good scheme to me.
Could they have thought of a more stupid name though? :lol:
I'll be encouraging my 11 year old son to get involved with one.
Looks like a good scheme to me.
Could they have thought of a more stupid name though? :lol:
I'm guessing that with those sort of prices you don't get much of a marketing budget.Originally Posted by rauldinho
You should take a look at the stickers on sale in their store...... :DI'm guessing that with those sort of prices you don't get much of a marketing budget.
http://www.raspberrypi.com/keyboard-sticker/
That store is about as well stocked as an East German luxury delicatessen in the early nineteen sixties.
It's very.... British.That store is about as well stocked as an East German luxury delicatessen in the early nineteen sixties.
They really do seem to be trying to emulate the likes of Sinclair and Acorn from the early 80s. "Model A" and "Model B" indeed...
I hope they succeed and these boards become hugely popular. But we'll see...
I'll be buying a couple. Brilliant idea and USB powered.
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
- Bender Bending Rodríguez
I was about to post this up. Braben is a legend. Elite was amazing and still is.
Can you imagine Bill Yao adopting this business model? :D
I'll be buying one for my mate's son - if I can train him up to take over from my unofficial role of his family's first-line tech support it will be money well-spent.
Yao has a business model? :lol: :lol:
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
I'll be buying one and I predict great things will come out of it. Tried to get into PICs when they first came on the scene but couldn't devote the time, these should be a factor easier to get your head around.
Agreed, especially if it will give my son an insight into how YouTube/Facebook etc actually appears on the screen in front of him!
:D
I am going to get my nine year old neice one, she i really bright and technically minde for her age. This reminds me when I got my Zx-81 for Xmas, that christmas holiday flew past!! I''ll happily pay £25 for this.
Yao has a business model? :lol: :lol:
:lol:
I meant this:
No pre-orders have been taken because the organisation said it did not want to take anyone's cash without having something to hand over in return.
I'm definitely going to get one of these to play with, would be a nice cheap media streamer. The only thing I spotted was the £16 model doesn't have ethernet built in, so they won't be selling many of them then!
It will be fascinating to see the uses people come up with for them.
I have no idea what I'll be doing with it but I'll be getting one.
I have a habit of starting to learn a little bit more programming (Lisp was my latest) but I don't get very far and just keep hacking away at Matlab. One of these could be a good impetus, especially if a little community grows around it with project ideas, tutorials etc.
Looks like there's a slight delay until the beginning of February - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/03 ... i_auction/
If you really can't wait you could always put in a bid for one of the beta boards here on the world's favourite cyber boot sale - be warned, you will need more than £22 though.
<splutter> Grief, that's as bad as many of us lot who pay (lots) extra for a watch with a 'rare' feaure like red writing or a faulty dial...
Ready to build an army of XBMC boxes with these
ARM has been a bit weak for this, mostly because of inadequate floating point processing. My 5W plug computer (Marvell Sheeva ARM CPU) can decode fine, but doesn't have enough floating point umph to re-encode music on the fly. However, the new Cortex 9 dual core with the extra bells and whistles looks like it will be capable enough for all sorts of multimedia stuff. Of course, it will cost more.
Best wishes,
Bob
PS I thought XBMC pretty nifty. After using over the Christmas/New Year break, my wife decided she didn't like the interface. And I didn't like any other packages. Consequently, I had to spend a couple of days earlier this week "rolling my own". I just used the window manager, some very simple scripting, and independent programs. Given that the programs all use the GTK graphics toolkit, they have a common configuration for "look and feel". It turns out that my system doesn't have as much eye candy, but is simpler to use, as it can be completely controlled with a (wireless) mouse .[1] It also uses many fewer resources, and is, I think, at least as robust. Better still, my wife likes the interface much more, mostly because the music program (gmpc for MPD) is the same one she uses on her MS Windows computers (just bigger, since it is looked at from further away). XBMC has a MPD plug-in, but it works just differently enough from gmpc to cause some confusion. One computing moral that I've taken on board over the years is that people don't like gratuitous changes to interfaces. They can get used to just about anything, but once they have, they like to stick to the interface they know. Which is probably why I still do most of my computing work using a terminal emulator and a shell. Fair enough.
[1] What makes XBMC easier for most people to use is that the configuration is internal to the program. I have to configure mine by editing configuration scripts. Since this is the proper way to do things, I don't mind. :)
RLF
And ain't that just the truth.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/raspberry_pi/ ... ksid=p3686
The first pair of pathfinders (#10 & #9) end this evening with the first one currently standing just a century short of two grand with nearly six hours to run. Anyone fancy a punt on what the winning bid will be?
Thanks for posting this I hope they inspire many people to explore the fundamenals of computing technology, I'll be very interested to see what type of analogue/digital low level I/O these provide.
Do you fancy writing a HowTo on this? It sounds most interesting.
Good observation about people's dislike of learning new UIs. :-)
Probably has more computer power than there was in the first space shuttle :lol:
That article certainly caught my eye when it came out. Looking at the website they have achieved a lot and look like 10,000 units will be out in the next month or so. I'll certainly be picking up a couple up if I can. It's been a very long time since I tinkered with electronics but this has whetted my appetite. Should be good as a media player, others are looking to use it in MAME, a little work on the I/O and it could be used for a lot of robotics stuff - really will be interesting to see the applications people develop.
Also http://www.codecademy.com/ have launched their coding academy - looks to be based around Java whereas the Raspberry Pi is based around Python (to be launched later on codecademy) Michael Bloomberg signed up for it so it's generated a load on interest. I did the first couple of lessons and it's fast paced but looks interesting to me. But it might be something to think about if you want to try to programme the Pi.
It's a good time to learn programming and electronics. I use Matlab rather a lot at work and have used Visual Basic and C++ in the past, but there are more "hobby" tools around too. I've just started Project Euler which is for learning maths and programming; I decided to do that in Python which is a completely new language for me. I got an Arduino for Christmas which is coded in C. I've done the first set of lessons on Codeacademy, which is is in Javascript (another new one for me). Raspberry Pi will be another language, potentially (although probably Python).
I've looked into LISP but can't get my head around it yet.
All good fun.
In that vein, here's a short piece on the Apollo Guidance Computer, along with some feeds and speeds using the original IBM PC as a yardstick - http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/ ... -computer/
Interesting read. Thanks. It is pretty amazing how much you can get done in how little space with handcrafted assembler, if you don't mind a lack of eyecandy.In that vein, here's a short piece on the Apollo Guidance Computer, along with some feeds and speeds using the original IBM PC as a yardstick - http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/ ... -computer/
Best wishes,
Bob
PSI'll see what I can do.
RLF
From the RPi forum team:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/495#commentsThe XBMC guys are actually working with an alpha board on a port at the moment. No eta, but they say it’s going well.
So XBMC may be a possibility. Although my Intel Atom N270 and Ion chipset netbook struggled with XBMC (but had 2 years of XP baggage dragging down system performance).
Looking pretty healthy with XBMC
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/571
Release is any day now too.
So is this a good place to learn to use Linux etc on this machine?
Anyone?
In the first incarnations, I suspect that these are best suited to those who have some experience with linux and with development boards (enthusiasts). There isn't going to be much organized help. If you want to learn to use linux, and don't have much hardware/*nix experience, it would probably be best to reduce the variables, i.e., a straightforward computer where the hardware is pretty standard, and experiment on that.
Now whether this is the best place to learn to use linux on this board. I suspect not. My guess is that it might be better to learn on a forum where the folks were focused on that board.
Best wishes,
Bob
PS My web server is an ARM based "development" board. Although it isn't extremely difficult to use, having a good working knowledge of linux, and a fair understanding of the hardware made the difference between it being a real pain, and it simply being a challenge. I wouldn't have liked it at all if working with it had also been my first experience working with linux (or any OS, for that matter).
RLF
Thanks Mr. F. :)
http://www.raspberrypi.org
Main announcement up now
I have to admit, I don't get this. You spend £16 on a computer but need to plug in £200 worth of peripherals to get it to work and you have to write your own software. Why would anyone want this? I already have a PC, and I can find compilers and code courses essentially free on the internet. I also have a smart phone which I can develop apps for if I want a pocket sized computer. For the expressed purpose it seems like a redundant device to me.
Although, 256 of them would still only cost just over £4k. Maybe you could configure them to process in parallel for some cheap number crunching power.
All you need to plug in are a keyboard, a screen and an SD card. They have added composite video out on it as well, with the thought a lot of people will have an old analogue TV they could use. Most people wont need to spend anything to get going on it, but if you did a keyboard costs £5, an SD card less than £10 and you should be able to pick up an old CRT locally for free or under £10 from eBay. A grand total of £25 worth of peripherals.
You don't have to write your own software, there will be plenty of linux distros for it, and people are already planning on getting things like XBMC up and running on it. It's main purpose is as an educational tool, allowing schools to have powerful yet simple computers for kids to learn and experiment on. But plenty of other people seem keen on them for all sorts of purposes like home automation and robotics. You could connect 2 external HDs to it, and run it as a home server, backing up all your computers and acting as a central file store, or use it as a NAS. You could connect a webcam and mic to it and use it as a baby monitor, anything you can think of. Its a PC that will run off 2x AA batteries.
For what a lot of people use a computer, this would suffice. Email, photo and music management and of course browsing TZ :P
I can see these being harnessed for home automation and cheap media players but a fair few of things like this already run cut down embedded linux of some kind already.
The BBC news page has this aimed at the kids market for schools. Cheap accessible programming for the masses to hopefully bring through the next David Braben and to provide a safe programming environment. But this already exists and is called a PC.
I am a professional programmer and started coding on a Spectrum 48 in 1984 but as much as I would like to think the next generation will learn programming from this I cannot see it happening. Young gifted programmers will still emerge as they will start on a PC with Google for help and create more and more complex programs. Maths graduates will learn to program at uni and put their enormous brains to work at CGI and gaming and database programmers will learn on the job. Just like now.
Of all those Z80 machine code games programmers of the 1980's how many ares still going? Some got good at business and some moved into C++ but in the future even C# will be low level. The argument that a basic "box" needs to be provided with an in built programming language like we had in the 80's is outdated. To become a programmer now you need to know some operating system skills, lots of integration, design skills and finally a bit of programming nous. Lots of things working together are the future. Look at this page. PHP, HTML, graphics, CSS, the Flash clock up top and Java - all making it work.
Why hide that from the beginning and why push kids into a non standard system?
That said I might get one for fun and to be proven wrong :)
Maybe but then again it may perk some kids' interest and they may enjoy fidling with it and see how it works, mod it etc.
Speaking to someone today, he said this will end up being more popular http://www.fxitech.com/products/
Hadn't seen that one before, looks like someone has realised what people actually want the Pi for rather than education
I've been on the Pi mailing list for a long time, 6 months/year? But couldn't get one yesterday at all at 6.30am. I am interested as my introduction to computers was a ZX81 and spent hours typing code in from Your Sinclair to get BASIC (both meanings) games in there. The Pi appeals to my sense of DIY-ness.
I'll be getting one to use as a lightweight domestic web server (it will replace an old PC I use for that task presently). All I need are an SD card, and a keyboard and monitor that I already have (and it won't even need the last two once it's up & running).
Solar powered, in bicycle navigation and entertainment system!
Best wishes,
Bob
Well, the whole point is to learn about writing your own sofware and the technical aspects of computing. ;-)
That said, one can learn about all these things without this board. Everything that one needs is already present in one's existing desktop or laptop computer. Whether you're running Windows or Linux, everything you need to learn all this stuff is available for free. I don't really see that this board adds anything new or enabling, cheap though it is.
I hope it succeeds, I really do. I would so love to see people, especially the young, really getting to grips with proper IT skills (rather than merely using the packaged experience that most people accept). It would really help the economic future of the country.
BUT... there genuinely does not seem to be anything in this device that cannot already be done with existing hardware and (free) software. If people of all ages want to learn to program or learn about the technicalities of computers it is as easy for them to do so now (easier in fact due to the information resource of the Internet) as it was back in the ZX-81, BBC, Commodore 64, ST, Amiga, etc. days on the 1980s. I just don't see what about this new board will make any of it easier than it already is or will make it more likely that people will make the effort. Almost anyone who is interested will be doing it already and anyone who's not still won't be interested. Sadly most people aren't interested: They just want the tech to work and don't care how it does it. Of course, that doesn't bode well for the future of our economy but most people don't care about this at an individual level (it's always somebody else's problem, they think).
Agreed. I just don't see this making any particular difference to education or (young) people's interest in technology. If people of any age were interested, they could and would be doing it anyway.
Nevertheless, if these devices can help improve IT teaching in schools (such that it is genuine IT, not just redundant word processing lessons) then that would be a good thing. Sadly I don't see it happening without course automation online.
However, these boards do represent a really good basis for home automation or server projects, as various people have commented. Perhaps that is their real future: Cheap, dedicated-purpose servers.
Something so simple looking doing so much as you say like their normal computers. It maybe causes a few out of the many to extrapolate from this and create amazing things in the future.
Sod the techy Steve Wozniak special, that Cotton Candy is a game changer - plug'n'play anywhere, gotta be a winner!
If anyone here has a Raspberry Pi on order, then be prepared for a slight delay whilst they sort out the latest snafu - Raspberry Jam
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