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Right, that's the primary use in my mind. Not gonna be much use to a primary school student.
It will be all in the software. Make this thing boot into a python IDE with pygame installed and you have this generation's QBASIC.
This is like the best-documented vaporware ever. I hope they prove me wrong soon.
There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.
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> For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer. Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9 years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the same one, if properly partitioned). And it's unlikely a hotel or your stude…
A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks. But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion. Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks. Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the va…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks. But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion. Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks. Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the va…
uh, you can run other OSs on Apple hardware. It's a little bit trickier because of EFI but it's not hard. What you can't do (Apple say) is run Apple OSs on non-Apple hardware.
Something has always struck me as fishy about this whole thing.
I'm really excited by this project. I think it's a great idea. I very much hope they sell them to anyone, maybe at a slightly higher price to subsidise the others. But there's a tiny [1] hint of regret that modern programming is necessarily abstracted away from the hardware. When people were using the popular home computers of the 1980s they would be able to use some version of BASIC, and then also some machine code…
A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without needing to download, install and use a compiler.
We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered harmful" sense.
If they think this PCB is "packed" they haven't looked hard enough at a smartphone teardown. Go look at the iPhone 4S teardown: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2
This is like the best-documented vaporware ever. I hope they prove me wrong soon.
What doesn't look legit? The PCB silks look typical, the board size is about right for a small SoC-based design. You just need a lot of space for those large connectors like SD/MMC and HDMI. There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.
These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets rolling is the shaky part.
Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust to Broadcomm.