The Raspberry Pi Will Bring Fun To Computers Again

The Raspberry Pi Will Bring Fun To Computers Again
dreamintech.net

It's a computer, cool, but I think that most of the people who are looking for "fun" in computers are already finding it in things like the Arduino.

Something I will hope for is that this disrupts some hobbyist economics. Things like the IOIO board from sparkfun (plugs into android, gives you 50 GPIO pins) are still really expensive ($50).

The arduino is too...$30 for a board that doesn't have wifi or any way of connecting to a network without an external card (shield).

The real holy grail of this stuff will be an arduino or a raspi with a wifi chip in it that costs $30 or less.

These little computers are all good, but when you have to tether them to something or buy an expensive add on to make them see the rest of the world, it kindof ruins the form factor for me.

This is something thats been scratching around in the my brain for a while and has driven me away from software. To me, software used to represent infinite possibilities, this blob of clay that you could sculpt into anything you wanted it to be. These days software is quick to slap your hand away when you get too close to messing with the fiddly bits.

I'm a bit more jaded than this poster, but I don't think the Pi will be able to bring the lost world back to us. Tinkering isn't what it used to be in general. Instead of popping down a product and an accompanying RFC that allows anyone to write other software to interacts with it, creators want you in their playground, doing operation they approve or nowhere near the tech at all. They're not just tight-lipped, I even see encryption to keep the tinkerer out.

My brother is a snowmobile gearhead. He used to machine a piece of metal that went somewhere in the engine. I don't really pay attention to that stuff to know the full details, but essentially modifying that piece of metal would tune something in the engine. Whatever that piece of metal controlled has now been replaced by a computer chip. It is an awesome idea, with amazing possibilities. He could set up his machine on the dyno and just sit there adjusting variables to tune and get exactly the performance he wants. Iterations between adjusting and testing is infinitely faster because he doesn't need to go do metalwork.

But thats not the way it works. He can't change the values on the chip. It has gotten orders of magnitude less work to modify, but he is physically unable to. He can bring his sled to the Bombardier dealership where there, and only there, can he tune the sled. He can't tweak values to find maximum performance. He can choose from Configuration A, Configuration B and Configuration C.

This is where software is taking the world my friends. It is why I don't tinker anymore.

There's like a whole modder community around custom fuel-injection controllers with reflashable firmware. Serious performance wonks replace the entire board -- CPU, memory, everything except for the output lines -- to the fuel injector with something they can order online. The new board has like a flash memory chip that lets you sit there with a PC and tweak variables until the engine has the performance characteristics you want.

I was approached about the feasibility of writing an Android app so these people can do the tweaks with their smartphones.

There's still tinkering going on.