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Details About Raspberry Pi Foundation's $25 PC
First time accepted submitter salcan writes "There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We've seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November this year. Eben Upton, director of the foundation, recently gave a talk at Bletchley Park regarding Educating Programmers, which focused on the thinking behind the $25 PC."
So, when i unplug my peripherals from my computer case, it ceases to be a PC? Whoa. Radical, dude.
I am convinced that I can always be convinced otherwise.
$25 is less than the cost of most Arduino boards, if it's possible to add some digital/analogue inputs/outputs it could become electronics bloggers new favourite toy (at least for high power mains projects, I suspect Arduino will still have much better power consumption!)
It has a HDMI port
It also has an analogue TV out.
We don't even know how much RAM will it have
The $25 version will have 128Mb, and there's a $35 with 256Mb.
whether it will run Linux
It will run Linux, originally the hope was to run Ubuntu but with their restricted memory footprint they're having to go with a version of Debian instead. Amazing what you can learn when you watch the full video and actually listen to it.
If 128MB version costs $25, why they didn't go with 2GB for $30 instead? $5 difference for almost "classic" web PC with mainstream OS (Ubuntu).
839*929
With the creator of Elite, then yeah, it /is/ rather reminiscent isn't it? So many schoolkids in the UK got started with the Beeb, I even got into minor 6502 ASM with that inline coding you could do.
This PI thing really does feel like a return to form, funny how things go around in circles, from Beeb, to ARM, to PI. Hopefully education sees these as the fantastic opportunity they are.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
First time I've heard this mentioned. This really is the successor to the BBC Micro!
Fruit-based name.
Comes in "Model A" and "Model B" versions
It just needs a picture of an owl on it now.
Of course not, it's a Mac. XD
(I know, I know...)
If so many people use their PC for web browsing only, absolutely anything that is more power efficient ,portable and cheap should find its market and not only in third world countries .I saw a movie on youtube showing Quake 3 being played (and rather smoothly) on Raspberry PI, so it's not that slow.
quality wireless alarms and shutter door gate controllers
You raise a good point that a all-in-one solution, such as a laptop, would be ideal. But what's so interesting about the $25 PC is that it's not all-in-one, and encourages thinking outside the box. After spending a month or two toying around with Linux, students could be encouraged to explore cutting-edge technology by pushing all their Raspberry Pi computers together and building beowulf clusters, render farms, or protein folding simulators at very low cost. Or perhaps even create a next-generation videogame console with this PC at the heart!
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
or that Mensa has really low standards
If you've only just realised that, you've never met a Mensa member before. It's a club for people who define themselves by their intelligence, yet are so insecure about said intelligence that they require affirmation by membership of a club that is `exclusive' to people who manage to get a rather mediocre score on a fairly trivial test.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Raspberry Pi hardware doesn't do the same things as the OLPC does. The Raspberry doesn't include an form of input or output as part of the reference hardware. So, at that point we are basically selling a computing core, ram, and some storage for $25. If the students need monitors, mice & keyboards at each location, they may as well just carry around a USB thumb stick with a custom LiveOS and put the Pi or other processing core at the work station. That sounds a LOT like my son's middle school.
That's true for K-12 education in the U.S. as well, but university students must purchase their own books.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Looks like a great project. I think a key though will be to have some well-written documentation or tutorials to go with it. For my first computer (Atari 800XL), my Dad just bought a book on BASIC and a book of type-in games, and it was going through those that encouraged me to learn and experiment. Hopefully they can get a hookup with O'Reilly or somebody to produce a companion volume.
Reeeally pie in the sky wish would be for a BBC series to go with it, a la The Computer Programme, Making the Most of your Micro and Micro Live. Never gonna happen sadly. :-(
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Who the hell has a low UID? Are you smoking something? Or did I miss a few million registrations?
Back in my hole. Get off of my lawn!
Shut it, n00b. ;)
Shouldn't that info be on the WEBSITE?
It is.
Don't you check your "facts" before posting them online?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I did make it into university (actually, I had more trouble making it out again - after my PhD and a postdoc, I eventually managed to escape from academia, although they occasionally persuade me to return for a bit), but in school, including A-Level, all of my textbooks were provided by the school. Most textbooks for this age range were under £10. I still have a few of my textbooks (the school sold old ones off sometimes, or gave them away if they were switching to a new textbook the following year), so I just checked online for the cost of the new versions of them. The most expensive one was £12.60, most were in the £5-10 range. My mother was a teacher when I was at school, so I was constantly aware of the price of textbooks, because it was a significant factor in her school's total budget. At $100, they'd have been bankrupt within a year. At £5, they were struggling to find money to replace the ones that wore out.
University textbooks are more expensive, but that's no more relevant when discussing something aimed at schools than saying that cars are more expensive. They're a different product for a different market. School textbooks are there to give you a reference for the course and to be handed back at the end of the year. University textbooks are meant to be a reference that you will continue to refer to after graduation, if you stay within the field. School textbooks generally cover material that's been known for a long time, whereas university textbooks are expected to cover the latest research (at least, the ones worth buying).
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as it's a UK thing (and the price I've always seen was 25 pounds, not 25 US dollars) the price in Poland should be the same+shipping
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
The funniest thing about MENSA is what it means in Spanish. :-) Yeah they're so smart nobody noticed they joined the stupid club.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Also if your really poor, you probably don't want to buy a new monitor when an old one can be had for little or no money, and will work just fine. Same for keyboards and mice, new ones are cheap enough but used ones are often thrown out in large quantities and work perfectly well.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
That's probably OK for the next couple of years, while the digital TV switch is recent enough that people are still giving/throwing away their analog TVs. But by 2014-15, the cost of adding the analog TV interface to every motherboard just for the tiny few which will find new cheap analog TVs will not be worth it. Cheaper would be work on a cheap HDMI/analog downconverter. Which sounds like an excellent project from the HW community using a cheap motherboard like this one. By 2015 HDMI TVs will be cheap enough, and enough getting given/thrown away, that they'll probably be more plentiful and cheaper than the antique analog TVs still passing through the hands of collectors and luddites.
--
make install -not war
From what I can read, so far, nearly all of the commenters are missing the point. This is not intended as a "cheap PC" option in the same way that OLPC was meant to get laptops into the hands of third-world children; if you read up on it, it's intention is for use as a "standard platform" for learning programming techniques in a limited environment. People like David Braben grew up learning to write extremely efficient code because they had such limited memory to work with, such as the Sinclair ZX80/ZX81 which only had 16KB (NOT a typo, that's KB, not MB), the Acorn/BBC B with 32KB and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48KB. There is a general feeling that current students are getting "sloppy" and presume they're always going to have GB's of memory to stretch out in, so they've created PI to encourage creative thinking without placing too much demand on the wallets of students.
As new, perhaps, but I imagine that in my country about 95% of households will have an analogue TV which is now crying out for a use. (If they didn't send it to the tip having upgraded to HD)
But still, I think it's a mistake to have Linux as an OS. It's way more complex than the old 8-bit computer paradigm.
Yes, and no. The problem is that the old 8-bit paradigm doesn't really stretch to modern applications. There's no point doing this if the device isn't powerful enough to do things that the students will find useful. And these days, in order for it to be useful, it really needs:
* Internet access
* High resolution display
* Ability to run familiar applications (e.g. a web browser, office package, etc.).
The hope is to get the students to *use* the device first, then persuade them to tinker with it.
For our generation, the 8-bit systems worked because (1) there was nothing better within the average person's budget and (2) there was a network effect where large quantities of software were being written for the 8-bit systems and therefore they were useful.
If the only requirement was a system that was easy to tinker with, it already exists: Arduino is perfect for this application, and with the addition of a few peripherals is about as powerful and useful as the 8-bit systems we grew up with.
But a system that's actually useful for modern applications, presents useful software that the students can use to get the jobs they need to do done, that's more likely to actually get them using it. And once they're using it, *then* we can start teaching them how it works. And Linux isn't complicated enough to get in the way too badly, I think. And getting those applications working *without* that complexity would be tricky.
I teach some Unix system programming courses at a college. These might be a really good tool for that; for negligible cost, the students can have a fully-functional Linux box gives them real hardware root access, without the risk that they'll do any damage to anything.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I joined when I was about 17 out of curiosity; the people I met were mostly lacking any social skills, kind of awkward to be around and lacking any sense of humour.
Sounds very much like slashdot then.
Slashdot has a sense of humor, just look at how Unicode is handled!
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
GRRR! Stop it. You're scamming people. Do you sell it? Please. Look at the reviews, idiot.
Those "cables" don't work. HDMI is a digital signal. You need at least an integrated HDMI-to-RGB single-chip to convert it to a VGA signal. Those cables only work if there already are RGB analog signals on the HDMI connector. They are present only on very few devices. XBOX comes to mind. This $25 computer does not have a DAC anywhere that would produce analog RGB signals, they are not present on the HDMI connector, and you need a converter for that.
Stand-alone HDMI to VGA converters will double the cost of the system -- they sell for about $25. Adding a DAC and a VGA connector to the board would probably raise its cost by $7 in ~1k quantitites.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm pretty sure they aren't going to replace their TVs unless they break. And even then, they'll go get it repaired before buying a new one.
Furthermore, an SDTV that can't be repaired will be replaced with an SDTV from a pawn shop or a charity shop. This is what HDTV geeks don't understand. But then, there are a lot of old CRT computer monitors, which would still work with an enhanced--definition (480p) VGA output.
It only has meaning in a few Latin American countries. From the DRAE:
menso, sa.
1. adj. coloq. Ec., El Salv., Hond., Méx. y Nic. tonto (â- falto de entendimiento o razÃn).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Nah, everyone over 210684 is an idiot.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Nope. Universities do not teach students, and they do not employ teachers. Universities employ lecturers, who present information to students and place them in an environment where they can learn. The students are supposed to teach themselves. This is the difference between a university and a school. You go to a school to be taught, you go to a university to assisted in learning. Failure to understand this difference is one of the biggest reasons why people drop out of university.
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That's a very interesting distinction. Certainly touches on an important difference between university and "lower education".
But this is trying to over-specify "school" and "teach" to suit your purpose. In reality, "school" applies to universities, and "teach" applies to lecturing (and advising).
If your gripe is that "school", as you understood it in the context of the article, means "``lower'' education", then that's the point you should make. And I agree with you there -- investigation turns up evidence corroborating that this is what Braben means:
Within a few years, Braben says, every child could own one of these computers from age 11 until graduating high school.
(Quoted from an American publication.)
Be careful about getting lost in details, especially in reflexive defiance of those who contradict you. It drags everyone into the weeds.
You young un's. Always arguing when us old-timers are trying to get some shut-eye... :)
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
No, it's bad but not that bad. PAL is 625 by about 700 or so. That's reduced a bit by imprecision in the electronics and at the edges by the frame, but it's still at least 550 lines. NTSC is about 15% less after deductions. 640x480 should work reasonably well on either. Both are interlaced, though.
A decent ~20" 1920x1080p LCD TV can be had for less than $150, shipping included, though.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry