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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."
>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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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.
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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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