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Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

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Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#511

Post by asdfman123 »

cactus2093 wrote: post #409
ineedasername wrote: post #265

This blows my mind. I know, it's much more incremental than it is revolutionary, but I think the form factor achieves a much greater degree of access for many people than a typical Pi whose bare hardware may be a lot more intimidating. Now, it's "just" a computer, which happens to expose a 40-pin connector for the standard Pi hardware fun. And unlike other options you might find, this has the massive built-in communi…

> The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book. How many households in this situation have an e…

They're poor, not desert nomads. Monitors and desks can easily be found for reasonable prices. Lots of people have random desks and old computer monitors sitting around.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#512

Post by ineedasername »

867-5309 wrote: post #487
rini17 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so problematic today, there are multiple TVs in most families now. And old functioning, like, 1280*1024 LCD monitors can be had for free.

it's more likely an old keyboard is lying around. a Pi4 and cheap enclosure could then be picked up for half this price

An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.

And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, ask friends/family, you might get by. That's not a scalable solution for 1,000 kids in my school district that lack resources, much less the thousands more in surrounding districts. As with many technical problems, scaling is a challenge, not the single one-off solution.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#513

Post by leoc »

kevinpet wrote: post #462
leoc wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that the old '80s microcomputers were often plugged into TVs was that monitors were too expensive. Sharing the TV with every other device and person in the house was a necessary evil. TV-hogging is probably about as problematic now as it was then, while displays are much less expensive. So including a screen makes much more sense for a low-cost access-to-computing device these days.

You're replying to a comment about kids trying to distance learning on their parents phone or without a desk. You're missing the point.

I am not. In the developed world there's comparatively little chance that a school district or national education system could afford about $100 per head for a rollout of RPi 400s but not the say $240 or so per head (being pretty conservative) for a rollout of clamshell devices instead. Especially since you'll make some of that $140 back just by avoiding the technical support costs of helping families get the computers working with a zoo of BYOD HDMI TVs. Meanwhile in the developing world the assumption that everyone has at least one HDMI HDTV at home goes out the window. The original comment mentioned a supply issue with Chromebooks, but it seems unlikely that something like the RPi 400 is going to be much more secure against supply disruptions than a clamshell laptop.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#514

Post by ldiracdelta »

kingosticks wrote: post #412
ldiracdelta wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This spring, I deployed 20 PI's at work for a project and they are used every day, many many times a day. I've had 2 corrupt SD card failures so far. It's hard to know for certain what the cause is. We have spare SD cards to swap in for this application. For my application, having a spare SD image isn't a problem and I don't need five 9's of uptime, but the SD cards seem to be a point of fragility. Ultimately we're v…

Is your use-case not perfect for the network boot feature?

Many are remote and rural. Internet and network is frequently iffy. Has to work completely offline for hours at a time as needed, including after a power cycle.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#515

Post by jeffxtreme »

cactus2093 wrote: post #409
ineedasername wrote: post #265

This blows my mind. I know, it's much more incremental than it is revolutionary, but I think the form factor achieves a much greater degree of access for many people than a typical Pi whose bare hardware may be a lot more intimidating. Now, it's "just" a computer, which happens to expose a 40-pin connector for the standard Pi hardware fun. And unlike other options you might find, this has the massive built-in communi…

> The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book. How many households in this situation have an e…

Even for non-STEM students, the Pi setup seems fairly accessible.

From a quick online search, I could find monitors for $30 - $50 and webcams $20 - $30 which is pretty price competitive with a $200 - $300 Chromebook. The Pi community would help with any driver installation issues, and the Pi setup seems powered up enough to run Zoom with no issues.

Though I do see even cheaper Chromebooks in the same price range, so I wonder why / how districts are not able to provide these to students.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#517

Post by vopi »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #329
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #318

A long time ago I had a Commodore VIC-20 which was a gift from my cousin. The IBM-compatible PCs were firmly entrenched by this time, so the VIC-20 was obsolete but still functioned. I spent many hours playing with it. Once I discovered the User I/O port, I realized its true power. It wasn't a powerful computer on its own, but the fact that it could easily interface with the real world gave it abilities that the PC c…

That's what I was thinking about as well when I saw it. It's very reminiscent of the VIC-20 and C64. A tinkerer's computer. It's really cool that products like that exist again today, and are so affordable. Almost anyone can buy this for their kid for Christmas! I guess Python is the modern BASIC? I feel like what it's missing is an easy to use graphics package for drawing lines, circles and other basic shapes (kind…

There are easier libraries, but turtle [0] and tkinter (tcl/tk) are both included in the standard library that could be used for graphics. Turtle especially is geared towards beginners its similar to LOGO.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#518

Post by jodrellblank »

CositaS wrote: post #445
centimeter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US.

A flatscreen ? as opposed to a CRT?

"Flatscreen" as a right-wing racist dogwhistle term https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/jjlvz0...

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#519

Post by ineedasername »

sergeykish wrote: post #506
cactus2093 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book. How many households in this situation have an e…

Or used notebook, 6 years old Dell Latitude E7440 costs $230. It is built like tank. Price of the latest model starts from $1600. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/latitude-14...

Think about scalability. We need a solution for more than just one person. We need a solution for 1,000 kids in my town, 5,000 in surrounding districts, and I have no idea how many state-wide. How many such laptops can you find? How much effort will it take to source a dozen here, and dozen there, from hundreds of different sources? Repurposing old hardware only works at a small scale. If there were 50 kids in the school district, the district could put out calls to other families who might have old hardware. That doesn't scale to thousands of students.

These are resources restricted households as well: $200-$250 represents a significant increase over $100.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#520

Post by chmod775 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #503
sbuk wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assert that TV's are commonplace. This, just like the BBC Micro, ZX80/1 and C64, can easily be used with a TV.

In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV. The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.

>In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV.

That was a fair assertion 1997. Nowadays you will easily find a bunch of computers too.

>The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.

$100 isn't cheap when you're poor.

A poor family that has any sense certainly won't buy brand-new hardware.

When you have to save money, you buy second-hand, which will allow you to buy a fairly modern PC with a magnitude more power than that raspberry PI at half the price.

For instance I could pick this computer up for 1 euro simply because someone wants to get rid of it:

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/pc-computer-acer...

You can find tons of offers like these if you'd browse your local ebay/craigslist/whatever listings.

Why would someone spend 100 bucks on a new machine?

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