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Raspberri PI Release Announcement

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#172

Post by fmstephe »

This reaction is really surprising to me. The Raspberry Pi charity was set up in order to produce a product that could be used as an education tool. They have managed a spectacular feat, that has been 6 years in the making. This is a very exciting development but not just from a technical point of view. The Raspberry Pi represents the idea that computers are interesting to us intrinsically, that there is real value in providing a platform that allows for the development and satisfaction of a crucial intellectual curiosity. The true value of the Raspberry Pi will not be found in our mailboxes in the next few months. It will be in the possibility that the next generation will have something to hack on that prioritises learning and discovery over walled gardens.

Sorry for the preachy tone (it's not intended), I am sure that most people feel the same way (or something similar), but it feels like we have lost some perspective while getting up at 6am to order some electronics over the internet. This is a great day. (I have a son and the Raspberry Pi feels like the most exciting project I have seen to date)

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#173

Post by PKeeble »

forza wrote: post #108
polshaw wrote: post #94

I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?). Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How in…

This is somewhat embarrassing for them, especially since they so confidently claimed to have everything under control. Kind of makes you wonder if there's any flaws in the device itself. I guess it those will have time to surface before most of us can get one though :) Handling a launch like this isn't very hard if you don't ignore the problem.

They ignored a lot of experienced advice given to them freely to get to this point. Its a shame really as this could have been a magically moment where they shifted a million devices in a week. Instead we are looking at 404 pages and there are no devices available if you do get through. A lot of potential customers have just been gone and will never return.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#174

Post by semanticist »

krelian wrote: post #162

I'll admit that I haven't been following this very closely, what makes this product this craze worthy compared to something like the Arduino?

It's not really directly comparable to an Arduino - it's a full-blown ARM Linux computer, with HDMI, ethernet, and a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM than an Arduino.

It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board.

An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer.

If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#176

Post by PKeeble »

fmstephe wrote: post #172

This reaction is really surprising to me. The Raspberry Pi charity was set up in order to produce a product that could be used as an education tool. They have managed a spectacular feat, that has been 6 years in the making. This is a very exciting development but not just from a technical point of view. The Raspberry Pi represents the idea that computers are interesting to us intrinsically, that there is real value i…

Education might be the stated aim of the project but its not the limit of the device. This is a device similar to an Arduino except for the fact its got HDMI, USB, is about 700 times faster and in the order of 256 million times more RAM and its only 25% more expensive. Its a hardware hackers delight and a desktop capable computer. It is also a very real competitor for nettops which sell in the millions at a price point 5-10x higher than this.

It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#177

Post by glogla »

krelian wrote: post #162

I'll admit that I haven't been following this very closely, what makes this product this craze worthy compared to something like the Arduino?

Arduino, while nice and useful (I used it more than once), it's much less than raspberrypi. Arduino's power comes from the community, nice IDE and a lot of examples that are easy to grasp even for someone who is not a CS major. It is wonderful if you want to make you off-shelf PC communicate with simple engines, many types of sensors, things like that, and it's easy to connect to Processing or puredata, it's basically what you get if you want an interactive art piece and don't want to mess with assembler, bootloaders, and whatever.

However, Arduino is 30 USD for ATmega, 20 I/O pins and a USB you can use to program it. Raspberrypi is 35 USD (1) for ARM as powerful as the one in iPhone, with 256 MB RAM, HDMI output, two USB ports you can use to connect peripherals, allegedly powerful graphic processors (though it's probably going to have proprietary bloby drivers) and an Ethernet ports. Oh, and some I/O pins too.

It's basically a general purpose computer, allegedly as powerful as Pentium III (2), as big as Arduino, and taking slightly more but still incredibly small amount of power.

For further comparison, BeagleBoard has slightly better connectivity but worse CPU and graphics, and is bigger, and is 150 USD (about 4x the cost). PandaBoard is faster but similar and is 170 USD (little less than five times the cost). And yesterdays Arstechnica article speaks about similar computer in shape of a small flashdisk with slightly faster CPU than raspberry and ! GB ram costing 200 USD.

This is like free.fr for ARM development boards. It doesn't mean Arduino is finished or something (it's best thing was always the simplicity - anything you can do with Arduino can be done with plain ATmega and some hacking and they're dime a dozen) but it's nice.

(1): though local prices vary. Here Arduino is listed as about 1 USD less than raspberry.

(2): I can't remember where I read that, and it might've been Pentium II, so don't quote me on that, plese

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#178

Post by zvrba »

DanBC wrote: post #139
zvrba wrote: post #129

Maybe I'm clueless, but why would you order one if you already have a PC?

Because you want a teeny tiny Arm development board? Because you want to make a fanless media server? Because you want to learn programming and your elder brother is hogging the PC surfing for whatever teenage boys surf for?

So it's a minicomputer without the disk, keyboard, mouse, screen, and speakers, which quickly adds up to $250 with cheapest components if you want to use it as a general-purpose computer.

At the same time, it runs linux and the same linux distro runs also in qemu, so you can do most of the develompent without actual hardware. So where's the rush, why does everybody have to get it right now?

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