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Do you have any insight into normal computer users at all? The average one is happy with the way their computer is configured, and scared away when they see that the rPI ships with a custom OS. In fact I think that most purchases have been done with the customer believing the rPI would ship with windows, just like any other hardware, and wouldn't have been if the users knew which additional burden they would get. On its website, the raspberry PI foundation doesn't prominently point out, that the rPI ships with a custom "OS" -- It doesn't even explain what an OS is. It is actively lying to its customers. It wouldn't be the first company lying, but many proponents of open source list transparency as one of its advantages. Where is your transparency now? I might have the source code, but the average user won't be qualified enough to build it themselves, or to even leverage the full potential of open source -- being abled to make modifications yourself. So transparency only helps a tiny elite of people. Wasn't open source something for the masses?

Work on porting to a cross-platform engine/library first. Without that your work will be much harder. And bullet points 6 and 7 in your system requirements are showstoppers.

Also, you may want to talk to organizations like Edubuntu, OLPC, and RPi since their primary focus is education.

If that was the case, putting a blob of material on the power supply chip (and nothing else) wouldn't remedy the problem – but it does (see the last post on this page.)

And this is what happens when you do a typical Internet whine fest before solid information comes out. Guess what: You're wrong. Rasberry Pi just posted a blog, and, yes, this is a nice Cortex-A7 quad-core. You heard that: Cortex-A7. You know, one with NEON SIMD and my favorite enhancement, Thumb-2 support among other things.

So yeah, this new Raspberry kicks ass. Hardly a crappy CPU. Aren't you glad to be wrong?

Although most search engine hits reveal a predicted release date sometime in 2017, the news of Raspberry Pi 2 immediate release is real and is listed officially at http://www.raspberrypi.org/ras...

I'd go with a Raspberry Pi (35$), either with a camera module or a no-infrared module; a small shell script will do, google for it!

I'd go with a Raspberry Pi (35$), either with a camera module or a no-infrared module; a small shell script will do, google for it!

Not at all, python's GUI is minecraft.

For some rough numbers, at 5V a raspberrypi A+ takes 500mA plus 250mA for the camera ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/hel... ). Maplin sell a 5V 10Ah portable battery pack (for charging phones and tablets) which weighs 330g ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/mapl... ). So off the shelf hardware gives you a 13 hour battery life.

I assume if energy efficency is your goal you could do a bit better.

I've built a a handful web servers hosting live HLS streams for PEG and hospitality customers and RAM disks are a very simple solution that works great for me. It doesn't take much memory to store just ~30 seconds of a hundred different streams, the encoders can use webdav to push the streams onto the server and Nginx (but probably almost any other webserver) can easily serve 10's of Gbps on the cheapest of the E3 Xeons.

I can't think of a cheaper and easier solution than a RAM disk for this particular application.

I'm trying to do a similar thing on the RPi to build a CCTV system. Live streams straight from RAM but to then use the hardware calculated motion vectors to trigger recording onto an SD card. Unfortunately I'm currently stuck trying to find a tool that can perform the HLS packaging of the segmented elementary streams the RPi camera can produce.

Note that you have to buy a codec license to activate the Raspberry Pi's MPEG-2 support. Once you've added the license key to your config.txt, XBMC will handle MPEG-2 just fine; I can stream shows from my MythTV backend without any problem. But, the sluggish interface is a bit of a problem, especially when using an IR remote.

Raspberry Pi Foundation has loads of stuff - see under Resources, Teach and Learn and Make http://www.raspberrypi.org/ - all intended for young people (and its on Creative Commons licences). The "Teach" stuff is written by Carrie-Ann Philbin, who is a professional teacher - she has quite a few videos of good stuff on Youtube.

The Mag-Pi, a magazine free to download (28 issues already) , has tutorials for games in both Scratch and Python, and Minecraft - anfd there's plenty of stuff in there that might fire YOU up! http://www.themagpi.com/

They released the docs http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-b...

You can run several non-linux OSs on it RISC OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan 9. Or you could write your own http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projec...

Actually they have made pretty good progress in this area. Ahead of most (maybe all) other arm boards and most PCs.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ope...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-b...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/qua...

Though i suspect when most people say well documented they mean that pretty much whatever you want to do with a pi you can easily find good tutorials. Want to hook up some electronics to so you can read/control them over a network, raspberrypi is probably the easiest (and cheapest) option.

Actually they have made pretty good progress in this area. Ahead of most (maybe all) other arm boards and most PCs.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ope...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-b...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/qua...

Though i suspect when most people say well documented they mean that pretty much whatever you want to do with a pi you can easily find good tutorials. Want to hook up some electronics to so you can read/control them over a network, raspberrypi is probably the easiest (and cheapest) option.

Actually they have made pretty good progress in this area. Ahead of most (maybe all) other arm boards and most PCs.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ope...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-b...
http://www.raspberrypi.org/qua...

Though i suspect when most people say well documented they mean that pretty much whatever you want to do with a pi you can easily find good tutorials. Want to hook up some electronics to so you can read/control them over a network, raspberrypi is probably the easiest (and cheapest) option.

GREAT IDEA GUYS. Android has been 'coming' for over 2 years now and pretty much nothing changed when BroadCom open sourced ... A SMALL PART of the video driver code ... I hope no one holds their breath on this one ...

They open sourced a small part of the video drivers a few years ago - and more recently released full documentation and drivers for the VideoCore IV 3D whatsits. (I gather this version has all the OpenGL gubbins running on the ARM side rather than doing the message-passing stuff of the previous driver, but you can run Quake III at a decent framerate using these open drivers.)

GREAT IDEA GUYS. Android has been 'coming' for over 2 years now and pretty much nothing changed when BroadCom open sourced ... A SMALL PART of the video driver code ... I hope no one holds their breath on this one ...

They open sourced a small part of the video drivers a few years ago - and more recently released full documentation and drivers for the VideoCore IV 3D whatsits. (I gather this version has all the OpenGL gubbins running on the ARM side rather than doing the message-passing stuff of the previous driver, but you can run Quake III at a decent framerate using these open drivers.)

GREAT IDEA GUYS. Android has been 'coming' for over 2 years now and pretty much nothing changed when BroadCom open sourced ... A SMALL PART of the video driver code ... I hope no one holds their breath on this one ...

They open sourced a small part of the video drivers a few years ago - and more recently released full documentation and drivers for the VideoCore IV 3D whatsits. (I gather this version has all the OpenGL gubbins running on the ARM side rather than doing the message-passing stuff of the previous driver, but you can run Quake III at a decent framerate using these open drivers.)

Yes
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ope...

These are great little boards for industrial automation projects!

I've used about a dozen of these in various configurations for everything from greenhouse controllers, to high end fish aquarium controllers, to data logging and serving up a web UI for a personal weather station. They've been an excellent price-competitive SBC. So cheap that it's often easier to just swap them out if they fail (I've fried a couple myself).

I designed a small stack of boards that expands the Pi to include:
- A base board with battery-backed RTC, watchdog timer, wide-input switching supply for +5V and +3.3V rails, Dallas/Maxim 1-wire sensor interface, buffered/isolated I2C master as well as a TTL and true RS-232 ports.
- A 16-channel AC driver board for 24-240VAC loads such as contactors and valves
- 32-bit DIO board
- 4-20mA input board (for industrial sensors)
- A prototyping board


You can see an early prototype here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...

The new B+ model is supposed to be better since they redesigned the power supply to be a switcher vs. an old linear style design, plus they've doubled the onboard USB ports.

It's Canter and Siegel for the new millennium. Expect to see more of this (and not just from Apple).

We need a proper open-source phone. Maybe it's time to look into that Pi-phone again. http://www.raspberrypi.org/pip...

You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.

Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.

Because Amiga, C64, Early DOS and UNIX's were great and successful. For me, all that stuff was my childhood and messing around with it is like going to a garage sale and finding my old favorite GI Joe figure or something. PalmOS5 failed right out of the gate. There's nothing to be nostalgic about.

If you want to do some cool hobby stuff (and I don't blame you, I do that sort of thing all the time) I recommend the following:
RaspberryPI or one of the several 3rd party variants out there: It's basically a small PC with a UART (hardware interface with buttons) You can turn it into a media player, an Audio DSP, a "car computer" whatever you can think of.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Arduino is a micro controller. Not to be confused with the RPI. An arduino will teach you how to solder :-)
You can run scripts written in C, and control lights, relays, sensors, etc... You can build something that automatically waters your garden, turns on your lights, feeds your pets... basically anything you can script.
http://www.arduino.cc/

AX84 is a website that has a host of amplifier projects. They are all tube based. Why tube? Well a lot of us think it sounds better, but that's a long argument. Even if they don't, it's how electronics started and if you want to know how things were done originally... and why that lead to how things are done now, Tubes are a great way to start. It's like learning to build a campfire by rubbing 2 sticks together. Yea, you could just throw a road flare on a dead tree, but somethings are just worth doing the old way. If you're not a musician, there's a Stereo amp near the bottom.
http://www.ax84.com/sel.html

Then there's steam engines... There's no collective site for that, but I've done them and they are fun. No codding involved unless you count the valves ;-)
These are super fun though. Imagine a device that can generate power from any source of heat. Even mirrors reflecting the sun. I recommend starting on youtube.

Anyways, there are lots of "useless" projects you can do that will have a far larger community and be far less of a waste of time in the end. Good luck.

If you look at the pinout diagram from here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/#introducing-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus

You will notice GPIO_GEN0->6. Perhaps those are 7 hardware PWM's.

But if not then go grab a PWM breakout board such as http://www.adafruit.com/products/1455?gclid=CN6MjrTKxb8CFSwS7AodhDYAcw
I have used their 16 channel PWM breakout and it was a pleasure to use.

While note a "real" power connector, you can power the Rpi through the GPIO header. Works nicely.

yes as long as your power supply is good it can supply lots of power to all teh ports see
http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...

It is - you can go up to 1200ma if you have the PSU to support it http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...

yes as long as your input power adapter is decent
the B+ can provide upto 1200 mA
see
http://www.raspberrypi.org/for...

> It occurs to me that this is just the sort of device that the Raspberry Pi people could very well have come up with in the 2 or 3 years since since the Model A and B were developed. It's a shame they never took the concept further.

They did, in April: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ras...

Those are x86 parts. I'd prefer a low-power ARM, as long as I get W^X, rodata, and I otherwise do not have to compromise on security.

Perhaps the recent source release from Broadcom is sufficient to make OpenBSD support easier, but I fear that the developers' perspective is now set.

No, they haven't completely resolved the multiple bugs with USB on the Raspberry Pi and I don't expect they ever will. Some of them seem to be completely unsolvable in software..

Incidentally, they've just started a beta test of the latest round of USB fixes: http://www.raspberrypi.org/php...

Looks like there are some parts (MPEG decoding) that will never be open. But there's a plan to make a open source firmware that is sufficient to boot.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/arc...

I hope the Foundation folks say "Thank you, much appreciated", and let the kids decide.

That was pretty much what I spent the day saying.

Educators the world over have often decided to insulate and protect children from the gamut of choices available to them in the Real World(tm). I don't always agree with the extent to which we "protect" children, especially as they grow older and feel very limited by society's restrictions, but I believe some amount of guidance can be helpful.

Letting the children decide between Mathematica and alternatives sounds amazing to me, and I'm very appreciative that you proposed the idea.

Atmosphere among the educators in the room when Conrad announced it this morning was pretty electric.

What do these educators think about Sage and other alternatives to Mathematica? Do you think these educators are famiilar enough with the Pi system, Mathematica, and mathematics software alternatives such that they can explain the differences and pros/cons to their young charges?

If people don't like the fact that it's only free as in beer, there's always Sage.

Yes, there is Sage, but while Mathematica's efforts got a big boost with front page billing, I see nary an article about Sage Math on the RaspberryPi blog. Whereas you just "announced a partnership with Wolfram Research to bundle a free copy of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language into future Raspbian images" (the officially-built/recommended OS), I believe that Sage has never been included in these images.

If you do want to give schoolchildren a choice between the two of them, why not start by writing an article about Sage and putting it in the default install as well? Unlike Mathematica, children will be able to download and run Sage easily and for no fee on any Win/Mac/Linux computer accessible to them, which will allow them to start projects on the Pi and move to beefier hardware later, or start a project on a school computer and bring it home to their Pi.

If children are able to make an informed choice between Mathematica and Sage (or other alternatives), then I support their opportunity to do so. Computers and the software that lives upon them should be given to children to explore, investigate, break, and repair. To truly give our future generations an opportunity to see the beauty of hardware and code I believe we should allow them to tweak and fiddle with the frobs inside these complex systems. A closed-source package like Mathematica curtails the possibility of investigation and dampens the fires of curiosity and innovation that can be seen in children everywhere.

Give children a choice? Certainly. But make sure that our educators can provide our students with exploration limited only by one's own imagination.

Can't wait to see if this is possible to see this effect with the Raspberry Pi and a Pi NoIR camera, given that you can
use the material from inside a floppy disk as a visible light filter

Simple & Secure Onsite + Offsite backups with a Raspberry Pi

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/kindle

1. A toolset they can use to build useful projects
2. A language they can grasp easily
3. And a genuinely useful project they can achieve

Everyone's best coding experiences have come from a desire to do something, combined with the right tools to achieve it. In the early days of 8-bit computing and BASIC, this was about making a game where the computer said "I've thought of a number between 1 and 1,000", and then you guessed and it told you you were too high or too low.

When you got that going, that was an extraordinary sense of achievement. "Look ma! I've made a simple game, you can enjoy!"

And then came Windows and complex APIs, and languages like Visual Basic that abstracted too much from the users, such that much that happened was 'magic'. Who - given a computer these days - begins to think "how do I *make* something amazing?"

Fortunately, things are getting better. The right languages are now available - most notably Python, Lua and Ruby - all of which are proper programming languages, but which are also easy to learn.

And the Raspberry Pi project comes from the right place. The issue it has, perhaps, is that people don't want to produce Raspberry Pi apps - and that desktop apps for Linux, whether written in Ruby, Python or anything else, are hardly childs play.

A better option for deploying a *real* app, people want to use, a modern equivalent of the guess the numbers game, must be either an app for a smart phone, or it must be a web app which can be deployed (for free) in the cloud. In which case, I think there are two or three options. (There used to be more, but Heroku Garden is no more). For smartphone development, Corona SDK is fairly mature and works with both Android and iOS. For a web app, there are a few more options, of which PythonAnywhere is probably the best of the bunch.

I suspect a decade from now, the self-taught developers will have mostly learned their craft in one of these languages, building useful apps for smartphones or the web.

The ethernet on the Raspberry Pi is provided via a USB-to-ethernet chip.[1] USB devices on the Raspberry Pi have been known to give all sorts of problems when there is insufficient power,[2] which was likely to happen if one powered it using a standard compliant hub which only provided 500 mA instead of the requisite 700 mA. Since the network connection was provided via USB, it was also affected.

Citations:
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs#Why no Gigabit Ethernet?
[2] http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Power_Supply_Problems

You remember incorrectly.

As far as I understand they were supposed to be donated in a $50 bundle ( according to Eben Upton ), not sure if that includes case, power supply, SD card keyboard etc. OCR is also supposed to be distributing 15,000 learning packs to go with them. I got this from their blog entry.

One of the points often mentioned about the Raspberry Pi is that the home PC/Laptop is not available for the kids to program on because the parents are scared of the possibilty of damaging it. Well I hope you can find three keen kids in your club to be rewarded with these machines.

Probably learn alot more than the pablum of Ipads...England has brilliantly got kids using Raspberry Pis and linux. :)

Now, who are you going to look for to solve your computer problems in the future? A know-nothing, button pushing, unthinking Ipad user, or a programming, linux, Pi wiz? :)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

No brainer, in my opinion...(but I guess there are no brainers running the LA school district...or maybe they are just corrupt and someone gave a few 'benefits' to school 'decision makers', etc. Sigh...)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

Probably learn alot more than the pablum of Ipads...England has brilliantly got kids using Raspberry Pis and linux. :)

Now, who are you going to look for to solve your computer problems in the future? A know-nothing, button pushing, unthinking Ipad user, or a programming, linux, Pi wiz? :)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

No brainer, in my opinion...(but I guess there are no brainers running the LA school district...or maybe they are just corrupt and someone gave a few 'benefits' to school 'decision makers', etc. Sigh...)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

raspberrypi.org

Because no ARM consumer hardware exists for someone to run a hackintosh on...

Seriously? Apple aren't moving OS X to ARM any time soon.

The Pi is similar in power to the original Xbox GPU-wise but not CPU-wise. From the FAQ, here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2

uhm, they wont mention it because it would defeat the whole purpose of RPI in the first place.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/about
"There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment."

The pi is about education, and part of that is the price. Its the price of replacing a whole board or simply swapping an sd card. The fact that you might plug one into a $2000 TV even is not the price we are talking about. Its about the cost of hacking the computer without worrying about its price.

With all the posts RPi s used in so many outstanding projects, it's certainly refreshing and newsworthy that someone is using it the way it was designed to be used, and running the software that it was designed to run!

Sorry, guy who used it to monitor sharks, you are just not as cool.

We used to have home computers with less computing power than an ATmega328, so get off my lawn!

...which also didn't run Linux. But I'm curious: even if it were possible, what would you do with Linux on an Arduino?

BTW, an ATmega644 - a chip very similar to the processors used in Arduinos - was used in one of the early Raspberry Pi prototypes (if one can call a device utterly different to the final product a prototype). It didn't run Linux either.

Just get one of these: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Everybody can afford them and they're programmable to your heart's content.

Srsly. Since when does a piddly $54 scare away a bona fide nerd. Having tools like this around when you have an epiphany on the crapper is priceless. I mean, come on, any of you could wipe your ass with $54 and still have plenty where that came from...

I was going to buy FOUR of them to hack and play around with small devices like the Raspberry Pi. Balked at the $216 price tag and never came back. Don't judge.
We have $25 single-board computers and $25 OpenWRT-enabled routers WITH USB SUPPORT (TP-Link WR703N).

A $54 Wifi dongle is, no matter how you put it, downright stupid.