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$25 PC Prototype Gets Award At ARM TechCon
New submitter gbl08ma writes "The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to create a $25 Linux box, won an award for the category 'Best in Show for Hardware Design' at ARM TechCon, even though they haven't yet released any final product (the release will be sometime in late November). Eben Upton demonstrated the capabilities of one of the prototypes that have been built. From advanced graphics at 1080p resolution to simple web browsing and desktop productivity, the small boards with ARM-based processors and PoP SDRAM have proven to be very versatile, fast and durable."
At present, I don't think that anybody is doing 2GB of PoP RAM, even the dual-core-monster-smartphones that cost 10-20 times as much cap out at half to a quarter of that...
ARM's push for the server world will presumably make (relatively) cheap ARM boards with substantial RAM available; but until that happens, treating ARM boards like contemporary desktops just isn't going to work. They are arguably wasteful and expensive in many applications; but the x86s of the world are brutally powerful.
Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I am going to be very happy with one of these and a wireless keyboard and mouse on the TV for those iIMDB moments and another on a monitor as a thin client, maybe a third with a usb disk as a storage server (100Mb wired to my router will be fine for wireless clients...
At $105 for three of them, that is a steal!
At present, it looks comparatively similar to the situation on the BCM devices that show up in routers: There is a general purpose CPU, with well known and GCC supported instructions, and a way to get Linux up and going; but the further you get from 'boot a kernel image and chat with it on TTY0' the more likely it is that the feature is NDA or supported by a giant blob.
>Either way I these devices will be great for home automation.
>Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
>lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
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Um, what. Do you really expect for the price of an Arduino?
I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.) My vision for this thing is to hang it on the back of the living room TV and use it as a computer in the living room... I currently use an eee nettop for this, but something even smaller and less power consuming would be more attractive.
And, speaking to the foundation's goals, it would be a likely solution for my kids to have computers in their bedrooms, especially if it could be done without wires.
This is going to enable so many nifty things.... Why by $400 thin clients when you can get on of these? Why replace you tv with an Internet enabled on when you can add one of these?
At $25, it may enable families in the developing world to own their own computer, or be the difference between internet access in schools or not.
I really hope this allows FOSS to release itself from winter hardware, and bring some hardware deversity into play, a true powerful, low cost, open platform.
Internet kiosks will be able to be put in unsecured enviornments and public areas... After all, it is only at most going to cost $25 if it gets trashed...
I say BRING IT ON!!!
Yes, but you can plug in a wifi dongle onto the usb port and boom: wifi!
Can't do anything about the memory, but the thing isn't meant to replace our computers for web browsing. These have a much less general use.
I had an 8-bit machine with a cassette drive, I well remember "less general use" machines, I also know that 95%+ of what my kids do on computers, for school or fun, runs through the web browser.
I suppose if I provided them with lame hardware that is incapable of web browsing, they might be more inclined to learn to program it, but more likely they'll just seek out some other way to get on the web and ignore the lame toy.
Monoprice has a tiny USB WiFi adapter that would be a good fit. The
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=105&cp_id=10501&cs_id=1050108&p_id=8072&seq=1&format=2
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
If you taped them all to the back of a monitor, you could pretend you bought an imac. cooool.
>Either way I these devices will be great for home automation.
>Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
>lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
So is Arduino. Dont forget it will be on same price level as cheapest Arduino while providing tons more functionality.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Exactly. What this will be good for is third world applications like information kiosks and schools, basically allowing anyone anywhere to be able to do basics like web browsing, document creation etc and I'm sure being Linux based it won't be long before plenty of educational apps are ported to it.
While most of us in the west probably wouldn't care for surfing on this thing (hell the hand me downs i gave to my nephews were dual core Pentiums with 2Gb of RAM) we have to remember that our own computer revolution started with computers like the VIC 20, which this thing is a supercomputer by comparison. I bet its incredibly miserly when it comes to power consumption as well, which will be a boon in places where power isn't guaranteed 24/7.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Then why bother with this thing at all? A refurb Pentium4 PC goes for $50 shipped. This thing only makes sense if you need a super-small form factor, and even then, rooting and flashing an older Android smartphone seems like a better option to me.
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The form factor (and power factor) are both extremely attractive - I'm currently using Asus eee nettops for the purpose, and they're good, but the Pi, with a little more juice, could be better.
The original intent of this PC is in the spirit of the VIC 20. It is a little computer for kids to hack around with. The difference between it and the VIC 20 is that it costs so little the adults won't mind if the kids hack around with it.
Not really. The Arduino doesn't offer a HDMI video output, but does everything else much better. Turning on a single I/O output on the Arduino is a single, straightforward, line of code, which doesn't require writing a Linux device driver. The Arduino also has ready made shields for everything you could need, and tons of example projects and documentation.
For home automation, and other hobby projects, the Arduino is much better suited.
A cluster of Raspberries is called a "Bramble"
Sheesh!
Keep up, can't you?
Your 4 year old P4 will pretty soon cost more than the small ARM board in power, assuming you actually turn it on.
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You're going to need a program anyway to do something useful. If you want to use this for home automation, flipping a light switch manually sure beats typing echo -ne "\x01" > /dev/gpio/something
program a script that i can edit on a device while i debug it, without compilation on host computer and flashing EVERY SINGLE time i try something
And as soon as you start programming something more complex, it's a lot easier on the Arduino.
no its not, unless you are special
What if you want to hook up a HD44780 compatible LCD screen to 14 GPIO pins. Are you going to write the entire LCD driver in shell script.
http://lcd-linux.sourceforge.net/
yep, you are special (man, i love ad hominem)
Or maybe the GPIO is connected to a speaker, and you'd like to get exactly 440 Hertz out of it.
its called hardware timers, confirmed by the devs as present on Rasp PI. Not to mention there is already sound output on the device so you have normal audio output instead of PC speaker equivalent.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I think you're still kind of missing the point of the hardware, however. From their about page:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
It's not really intended as a general consumer device, though there will be many general consumers (like me) interested. Their primary interest was bringing them into schools at a price point even poorer schools could afford for teaching computer related subjects (such as software development), and this little device will be more than suitable for this task. It just so happens the specs are good enough for there to be applications outside their initial target. I mean they got Quake 3 Arena running on the thing at a not too bad framerate at 1080p /w 4xAA and all the settings maxed out. I gather as far as web browsing performance goes we can expect something at least similar to higher end mobile phones.
At one time I seem to remember reading that the they were going to release it under an open-hardware license similar to what Arduino does. But I can't seem to find anything about it now. Was that a marketing ploy or a figment of my imagination?
1 or 2 percent of the general population is a market of 70 to 140 million people ....
Or if you feel that a 100W system simply has too much of an impact on your electricity bill.
If you want to keep it running for an average of 10 hours a day, it will consume 365 kWh per year. Even in the USA that's $36.50 per year. In places were people don't waste energy like they own the world - devastatingly poor countries like Germany - you're talking upwards of $100 per year.
The Raspberry is using 1W at full power.
It's intended to teach computing, not to teach media consumption using a computer. Like the BBC Micro that inspired it, it's intended to have a reasonable range of I/O capabilities for controlling electronics projects and a decent programming environment. Everything else is a bonus.
When the BBC Micro started to be replaced by Archimedes machines and later IBM PCs in schools, the focus on computer education shifted away from how it works and how you can control it to using off-the-shelf packages. I was right at the tail end of that transition, and my lecturers noticed a fairly abrupt jump in the programming abilities of people who were taught with the BBC to those a few years later who were taught with PCs.
We live in a society where basic programming is as important as basic penmanship was a century ago. Most people won't become programmers, but they will need to be able to use various domain-specific languages, even if just to write office macros. Yet, during this transition, our school system has moved away from teaching programming to young children - the time when they are most receptive to it - and taught them how to use specific software packages, rather than how to understand the underlying logic behind them.
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The project's been covered on Slashdot, what, four times now? And people still don't understand what the target market is!
This is not aimed at the third world (although I am involved with a project in Tanzania that's considering using them if we can get a FreeBSD port), it's aimed at UK schools. When I went to school, we had BBC Model B computers and a couple of BBC Masters. The A and B nomenclature of the Raspberry Pi is directly inherited from the original BBC micros, because they are intended to fill exactly the same niche: teaching kids how to make computers do what they want. Modern computing in schools has drifted too far towards teaching kids to do what the computer wants.
When you turned on the BBC, you were in a programming environment. Actually a fairly powerful one: a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct memory manipulation via PEEK and POKE, and a built-in assembler (i.e. everything you needed to write a JIT compiler, although I never did).
You also had a range of I/O capabilities, including analogue input and digital input and output that could be read or written to trivially, just by reading or writing the relevant memory address. These machines had just enough abstraction that they weren't totally intimidating, but it was thin enough that you could push (POKE?) through it and see exactly how things were working. That was what made it a good teaching machine.
The original BBC Model B cost about £300, in 1981s money. Accounting for inflation, you can give every child in the class one of these to play with for the price of buying the BBC B for the classroom back in 1981.
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That's just marketing. If you're going to get the computer into schools where it can be used for interesting things, then you have to show that it can also be used for things that the head teacher and the governors understand...
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There's no shortage of markets for these devices. Casemodders will buy them to run secondary displays. They will make fantastic computers for cars and even motorcycles (the little one ought to be trivial to fit in someplace.) A lot of people will be able to use them as a media player, myself included -- one that makes no noise, consumes practically no power compared to the display, and can be affixed to the rear of the television with a zip tie or a paper clip. The portability means being able to take the whole computer with you quite reasonably, so you know you're not running on compromised hardware.
I imagine that it ought to run an older version of Android quite satisfactorily...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
treating ARM boards like contemporary desktops just isn't going to work
Do I have permission to treat it as a 2002 desktop, which for 99% of the population is exactly the same as a 2012 desktop?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've seen that site maybe 18 months ago and it seems the release date keeps getting pushed back. Loads of publicity, yes, but I'll believe it when I can buy one.
I understand (at some levels) the concept of trying to create a computer for less than the cost of a textbook, but I'd much rather pay $45 and get WiFi, or even $55 and get WiFi and Bluetooth (or, gasp, even $75 and get a plastic case and power supply in the deal.)
Do I really have to look this stuff up for you?
bluetooth dongle for $1.86, have personally tested with Linux, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 & ultra mini 802.11b-g-n dongle, have not tested but I bet it works. For that little, indeed, I would bet. There are other options which are better-tested though, some just as tiny but with big antennas on 'em. Raspberry Pi B (the $35) version has two USB ports, so you don't need a hub. This stuff gives free shipping. DX also has a variety of USB-connectored Mini-USB power supplies (aka cell phone chargers) in the $5-10 range. Your goal of $75 is easily achievable if you just pick up a cute little plastic box, perhaps a pencil box or maybe an attractive piece of tupperware, and cut some appropriate holes in it. The kids' room computers probably need a better box but don't need bluetooth. I pick up USB hub media keyboards and optical mice when I see them at yard sales. This last season I picked up two keyboards with volume knobs and two-port hubs under $5 each, and two optical mice for a buck each.
Slashdot: whining by nerds
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Supposed to be coming next month... I'm not holding my breath, but I do believe it will make it out in time for Christmas.
Liz from Raspberry Pi here - unlikely you've "seen this Raspberry Pi thing a few times now over the past few years", given we only went public in May of this year. Still, we're thrilled that we've managed to excite you so much that we've created some sort of awesome time dilation effect in your mind. No, we're not vapourware.
Consider also that the first ipad uses similar specs to this and people freaking love that thing. I don't hear anybody calling it slow.
O.K. then, listen: the iPad (one, which is the only one I have used) is slow. It frags up its memory and needs rebooting, about weekly in my experience. It is hobbled by its OS into single tasking and its apps are all vetted before release into the store, and still they get stuttery and glitchy on occasion. It does some things "supercomputer fast" if you're talking about supercomputers from the '80s, but as compared to a modern desktop system of similar price, it's a damn dog.
Most of the apps that run on the iPad are written like they are from the 1990s, they deal with the lack of power by not doing things that require real power, and that's appropriate for what it is. I'm just damn amazed that the OS doesn't even support decent alarm clock (and, therefore, third party appointment calendar) applications, I've heard rumors that it does, but I've yet to see any evidence in the app store (i.e. Magic WIndow specifically states that you have to set it up before you go to bed if you expect its alarm clock to wake you in the morning, lame. That was even lame in 1985.)