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Build the 2006 Prototype $25 PC
An anonymous reader writes "As the launch of the $25 PC gets ever closer (sometime next month), members of the Raspberry Pi team have found time to start blogging about the history of the project. Eben Upton, director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has been working on the project for many years, and decided to share a couple of very early prototypes for the $25 PC with the community. The 2006 edition of the PC used an Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller. It ran at 22.1MHz with 512K of SRAM. Compare that to the final version of the PC, which will use a 700MHz ARM11 processor and 128MB/256MB of SDRAM. Five years clearly brings a massive leap in performance. For those of us happy to play around with components at this level, Eben has made the schematics and PCB layout available to download (ZIP file). Armed with this information you can create your very own 2006 Raspberry Pi machine."
how about a $50 PC with one GB of ram :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Finally... I can afford to upgrade my home PC to something more powerfull!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I would expect now that the popularity of desktops is waning, a lot of the prices to make really beefy systems in the short term will go down to much of a cheaper rate. Hopefully it will revise the revival of build it yourself computers. Perhaps we can get the whitebox equlivlant of a tablet PC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think i'll wait a bit (end of November) for the 2011 version :)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Of course it isn't useless.
Students can learn about the components that make up a computer and learn the basics of computers all for $25.
That's way cooler than anything we did in IT when I was in high-school.
At the end of it- you get a takehome computer capable of playing Quake 3.
That's how you get the kids interested in this.
I've never used Linux. For $25 I may buy a kit for my son for Xmas. He can learn about computers- and then I can steal it from him and teach myself linux.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
HDMI displays are rare, VGA displays are plentiful, higher quality and more versatile than the offered alternative which is a old TV with composite input.
a Rasperry with VGA would be better for its obvious use, as a game console loaded with emulators. there are truckloads of perfectly good 15" and 17" displays awaiting destruction as hazardous waste, having to buy a new hdmi display for a $25 toy or haul a big ass CRT TV and live with interlaced 640x480 is not fun.
As Wikipedia's article about reactive programming explains, spreadsheets are a form of programming. Someone running a business might write a spreadsheet to handle the business's accounting, run various "what if" scenarios to plan for the next year, etc., whether in a developed country or in a less-developed country.
The computer might be only $25 but without a few hundred dollars extra you will not be able to do anything with it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
funny, my cell phone is an ARM powered linux device. A 3rd world person learning to code on this would be light-years ahead of most first world students taking the typical intro to programming fare at college. People might complain that it must be hooked to keyboard and monitor, but cubic meters of those are disposed of by first world homes and businesses.
In the meantime I'd put linux on a VM on your main pc. So you're less likely to screw up and having to reformat the littlepc. A vm snapshot on a 400$ pc restores faster than a 25$, i suspect.
Happy hacking.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
If they are sticking to the $25 cost, this is getting cheaper every year even though they are increasing performance. If you figure the future value in 2005 of the cost at 2011, it should be around $39.
FV=(25*(1+4.5%)^6)*(1+3%)^6
= $38.87
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I realize that there are benefits to having large numbers of identical machines to ease management, but I assume these machines are going out into remote places where there won't be hundreds of them to control anyway.
Wouldn't refurbished Dell boxen, acquired 50-100 at a time, be more powerful and cost less than $25 each to deploy? This could be especially true if skilled laborers in the destination country did the refurbishing, imaging, and deployment.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Can you call it a "PC" if it's not IA-86 compatible?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They've been talking about this since 2006. They've built prototypes. They have a web site, logos, a wiki, and a fan club.
What they don't have is shipping product.
They really need to shut up and ship. They we get to see if their price point is real.
GuruPlug, the $99 Linux wall wart, is real and available. Gumstix has been offering machines around $100 for years.
Been there, done that. Between 2002 and 2009 I sold about 30,000 sub-$25 PCs to Egyptian geeks, who resold them in "Technology Malls". Our last 3 containerloads were seized by Egyptian customs and declared "e-waste" because they were "used." Our buyer was upset, but predicted that Mubarak was just "trying to put the genie back in the bottle", and it was too late. See German Language 3Sat.de coverage on how these used PCs played a role in the Arab Spring. http://bit.ly/soIn3G
Seriously, why do wealthy nations spend $25 to shred 3 year old PCs and then try to find ways to make "new" ones with less RAM and Mhz than the shredded ones for $25?
Gently reply
Looks like a fantastic controller for robotics projects or anything that needs more power than a typical ATMega based Arduino. Also, since it exposes things like the SPI port directly to a computer with a shell it would be awesome for electronics prototyping and learning.
You have (courage?) to deride open source on Slashdot?
It wasn't Linux that sank the OLPC it was price.
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
How about putting together a software suite that runs efficiently on this hardware? The hardware can be made even more cheaply through refinement, and the software can be fine-tuned to target these specs,it could lead to affordable and efficient computing in general. If the goal is to benefit the poor, or even to create a platform that will waste less resources, then don't create multiple targets, that will diminish the value of the lowest common denominator and undermine the ultimate efficiency and benefits of the platform.
Twinstiq, game news
As far as I know, this board offers:
1) 1080P output
2) Hardware media decoding
3) 3D Graphics
1 + 2 + 3: XBMC on Linux for ~USD 50 (Model B for USD 35 + guesstimating USD 15 for the case and the power adapter)
My cellphone ringtone is a ring tone.
You have (courage?) to deride open source on Slashdot?
It wasn't Linux that sank the OLPC it was price.
The project is still going, but the problems stem from the rudderless direction of the organization, not the OS.
As far as operating system I think for a project like OLPC Linux is an obvious answer, however OLPC effed it up. I think they would have done well to build it around a more or less standard environment that ran standard Linux applications. Instead they came up with sugar. Run entirely scripted applications on PII power. Brilliant! Run a sugar image in a VM sometime. RAM usage is mind boggling and performance is terrible. The idea of running everything scripted is the flawed assumption that everyone wants to tinker with the poorly documented code. And the availibleapps seem primarily based around programming and not building other skills.
Oh, really? Where can I order the CPU ?
You must learn the difference between "everyone will" and "anyone can"
blog.sam.liddicott.com
"Anyone can" with a conventional distro.