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Ask Director Eben Upton About the Raspberry Pi Foundation
When Eben Upton isn't working as an ASIC architect for Broadcom, he is the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a UK registered charity which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level. Raspberry Pi plans to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost
computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. Their first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed
to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a baseline Model A device, and $35 for a Model B device with integrated 2-port USB Hub, 10/100
Ethernet controller and 128MB of additional RAM. Eben has agreed to answer your questions about what it takes to make an ultra-low-cost computer, running an educational charity, or anything else. The usual Slashdot interview guidelines apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.
Are you the same Eben Upton who co-wrote the excellent Oxford Rhyming Dictionary ? If so, how'd you like that gig compared to your usual, more techie types of endeavors?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There will be a couple 3.3V general purpose IOs. The exact number and whether there will be headers or just soldering pads hasn't been decided yet, AFAIK.
That malware does not target USB drives. It spreads via them, it targets windows machines.
I'm pretty sure that's the goal. They'll even have a "buy two, give one away" like the OLPC.
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If you can afford a television with usable inputs and/or a conversion dongle, you can afford a netbook.
And you can still afford to buy this.
ARM linux is not a mainstream OS.
My phone disagrees with you.
Keyboards may be free or cheap to people who already have computers, but not so much to anyone who would be interested in a $25 inferior good.
Those people can buy them at good will.
If you already have a screen and keyboard, you wouldn't buy this, since it is inferior in all ways to any desktop from 1995 or later.
Let's count some ways it is better than this 1995 desktop:
1. HDMI
2. ARM
3. lower power
4. smaller
5. this still works
6. this has general io ports, 3.3v ones another poster claimed
This is a great product and I will be buying one, even though I have a netbook, smartphone, desktop and several smaller handheld devices.
...is competence in programming, much less actual computational science, better serverd by possessing a computer as opposed to promoting a strong foundation in fundamental mathematics?
(Yes, this is a loaded question, because there's a general concensus that possessing and using technology does not result in better education, much less an education in something as complex as the technology itself.)
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I'd also like an even wimpier model. Say, RS-232 instead of HDMI, and no GPU. If I could save three bucks and some power it would make sense in some applications. But I mostly want a more powerful model to also be available. I am really excited about the $35 model as it is, but I'd very much like something with more RAM, and possibly SATA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have stated in your FAQ:
What is your reasoning process here; Specifically as a charitable non-profit, what would be your motives for not making it an open design?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Is the HDMI CEC wire hooked up with a driver transistor? Hooking up that wire will let the PI control all of the HDMI devices. People are already doing this with the Beagleboard so there is software available.
The raspberry pi is meant to introduce programming concepts to school-level children.
My question is: How are you planning on doing this from a UI perspective? The BBC micro (as far as I can tell, a little before my time) simply dropped the user into a BASIC prompt and left the rest to their imagination. This seems like a pretty fundamental design question for the raspberry pi, but I haven't been able to find a clear answer yet.
Have you thought about creating cases for these things?
A keyboard would make a good case, possibly with a USB hub built in.
For about $10 you can add on wifi and bluetooth ($2 for a USB BT adaptor, $8 for a USB wifi adaptor). Sure they may not be the fastest, but for something like this low powered ARM chip, you're not going to be pushing hundreds of megabytes per second anyway, so it's not an issue.
Due to issues of scale, I bet it would cost them much more than $10 to add wifi & bt onto the board itself.
sig? uhh, umm, ok