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Raspberry Pi Beta Boards Unveiled
First time accepted submitter anwe79 writes "Those of you who have been wishing for a Raspberry Pi this Christmas will sadly not get your wish granted. However, you may be happy to hear that populated beta boards have now been produced. Beta of course means the boards still have some more testing to undergo. But, if all goes well, those inclined should be able to get their hands on production boards in January!"
I've been let down before.
Of course I am still under the "it doesn't exist until I can blow it up my self doing something dumb" crowd but it's making good progress
I think that surface-mount usb power connector will fail eventually since the images seem to show it not welded through-board.
Maybe they'll fix it on later models.(or it is already, but I'm not seeing the throughwelds from the pictures)
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I've been checking the website every day for like 6 months.
There are no holes in the board for mounting it to a case which seems like a major oversight. Maybe the RPi is good for education, their mission, but for my own projects I'll probably go for a BeagleBone. It costs about three times as much (the RPi is absurdly cheap), but at least it has documentation and mounting holes to go with its 50% faster processor.
I think you've brought up a very good point: Are there *already* "mature" products that do these things? The Arduino product line comes to mind. There is MUCH to like about Raspberry Pi, but little chance we'll ever see these things marketed for a reasonable *hobby* price. Prototyping something and saying the parts cost xyz does not really address realistic cost of the infrastructure necessary to actually source, manufacture, and yes, *market* something like this, which in all reality is very niche.
And, Arduino already exists in this market. This is not a troll: What does Raspberry Pi expect to do that something in the Arduino line does not? What are Raspberry Pi's close "competitors" in terms of expected use similarity? And, is there room for more than one or two competing products in this niche?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This board is perfect if you want to learn to program ARM assembly or cross-compiling but the ARM architecture it's one of the most closed and patent-restricted technologies out there. Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.
So it's not really open, even if the PCB design is open.
A truly open system would be OpenRISC, there are dev. boards out there like this one (I'm not affiliated to OpenRISC in any way). They are more expensive because are made with are FPGAs, but that's what you should learn in school.
Wait until work to learn proprietary stuff.
Dunno, I was in the same camp, no way they would actually ship at the stated prices, expect a doubling which would make it too expensive to be interesting. Or at least less interesting than the many other similar project computers and/or microcontroller products actually shipping. But if they are expecting to begin shipping next month and still holding to the original price they are either really going to pull it off or are truly idiots with zero business sense. I'd give em even odds at this point. :)
But why is it front page news every time these guys pass gas? If they ship it, that is news. Heck, when they auction off these guys I'd guess that would be news too. But d we need a story every month even when there isn't any actual news to report?
Democrat delenda est
The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-, ...) and they are OK for ssh. Arduino is fine as a microcontroller, but is no GP computer.
What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output. It can easily be a small xterm, or any other app you can compile for ARMv5t and stick on the SD card. Or email / web-browser on the network model. Not fast, but useable.
They appear to be bending the USB spec quite seriously. A USB device is allowed to draw up to 100mA before enumeration, and up to 500mA after being enumerated and negotiating for high power. They talk about using up to 700mA with networking connected -- it's not clear to me how it could enumerate without booting first -- so they seem to be giving the middle finger to the USB specs. I predict unhappiness when people find that only some USB power sources are going to tolerate the load.
Is it so hard to put a couple of holes in the board to solder wire to?
If this cheapo pc made for TVs gains any traction, we'll start seeing them built in to the TVs. Surest way to commoditize this stuff.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Is it so hard to put a couple of holes in the board to solder wire to?
Is it so hard to provide screw holes holes for mounting?
Also, it's usually considered a good idea to put all the connectors on the same edge and line them up flush so you can put the thing in a box.
Do I get a raspberry pie or 3.14159 rasperrys?
The point remains. Why would anyone buy one of these? Let me dish out a few points:
1. If it's running a linux kernel that means that you're going to basically be writing software in C/C++/Whatever for it. Why not just do that on your large linux box at home?
2. Looking at this thing it doesn't seem to have a large number of I/O and its processor is overkill for most embedded processing. When I said other cheap options I was thinking about PIC and other embedded micros but Arduino is another example to.
3. What market is this suppose to address? The cheap subtablet market? I don't get it. Most hobby projects will be better, cheaper and easier on a simpler micro and if you want to write large software, just use your home linux box. In either case there is already stuff on the markets for these very niche markets.
4. I have a hard time thinking this is a learning tool since if you really want to get into embedded hardware, picking your own micro and laying out the board is not a hard thing to do and you'll learn a lot more in the process. There are only so many projects that need a small overpowered processor and none of them are hobby/learning projects.
The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-, ...) and they are OK for ssh
The sheevaplug I have is powerful enough to run Gnome 2 in a vnc session. It also has built in storage and an SD reader.
"What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output"
That's not unique, the Guruplug Display has HDMI also, though I have no idea if that ever really took off and I have a feeling debian had decided not to support it. It is more poweful than the Pi, and has twice the RAM.
The unique thing about Rasberry Pi is the proposed price though, with the Guruplug display at $200. Though that does come with a case and power lead, 4 USB slots and two micro-SD readers.
1. My large linux box can't be put into as many places as this, makes a lot more noises and consumes a hell of a lot more power.
2. You missed the part of the board that exposes all the other GPIO pins on the processor then?
3. Cheaper than 25 bucks? And I can program them using the languages and runtimes I'm used to? With all the operating system features I have come to know and love? With HDMI output? Sign me up...
4. And as full systems such as this become cheaper, who will need to bother doing that any more? The embedded space is becoming more and more dominated by systems running linux already, this will only accelerate.
This is a learning tool for computer science in general, not just embedded programming. You lack imagination.
If you need more USB ports than provided on-board, you'll need a powered USB hub. Use one of the downstream ports from the hub to power the RasPi, and plug the mother-cable (I'm sure there's a better term, but I'm tired) into one of the RasPi's USB ports. Voila.
They already have a manufacturer lined up, from what I've read.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
In the forums there was even talk about 5 manifacturers.
Wrong on so many counts....
It's a Linux machine, not a microprocessor project board.
There are no other devices like this on the market at the price point.
Cost of boards are set - $25 for model A, $35 for model B. All sourcing and manufacturing is in place. Components for first 10k batch already purchased.
does it blend?
The only reason to have that is to use a computer under right?
I want a bunch of them, I've got several ideas already. Personally I want one to make into a software defined radio transceiver (hopefully there will be an API to the DSP to do the heavy lifting on this,) I want one to use as a browser in the kitchen for looking at recipes while cooking, and I want one to have on my desk at work as a syslog display machine. To do the first without using a Pi, I'd need to do an awful lot of embedded development myself whereas here a lot of the work has been done already. The recipe browser would be ideal with a cheap tablet (cheap because I'm expecting to spill things on it,) but I've already got spare monitors knocking around so a Pi will be even cheaper. And the Pi is a lot smaller and quieter than a general purpose desktop. The syslog display I currently do on my laptop on a separate monitor, but it would just be easier if it were on a separate machine. £15 is a price that can easily be justified. The market it's supposed to address is education, mainly for programming. It's designed so that kids can mess about with it, install what they want on it and not break the family's computer. It's designed so that kids can have one each instead of having to share one of the school's lab machines. It's designed so that the kids can do work at school and take that work home with them. It's designed to be very difficult to brick, but if it does get broken then the cost of replacing it is not too much.
1: I'm going to put one in a broken, mid-90s laptop that's lying around in the attic. You can't do that with a big linux box.
3: People who want a small, cheap, portable PC. Possibly people who carry live USB sticks around so they can run Linux on whatever computers are around - now all I need to find is a screen!
4: Who said anything about embedded hardware?
Oops, sorry for the formatting.
Could you please at least Google it before you write a post on a topic you obviously know NOTHING about and cause the entire world to be misinformed?
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
There's a huge problem with this board. Sure, the ARM11 chip is well known, but everything about the VideoCore IV GPU is behind an NDA. Developing under those conditions is hard and goes against the grain of what the PI is trying to accomplish. They should have gone with other silicon.
I think you nailed it, they are being open in the most useful sense IMHO.
Not that many of us have the contacts and technical and business and financial and intestinal talents required to pull something like this off. People seem to be falling into several divergent camps. It's a major breakthrough in price/performance, that is impossible in the real world, or no big deal, I know of somebody else, almost able to do the same thing (only costing twice as much).
They also have laudable goals for the project.
Watching them disprove the naysayers post by post is quite entertaining.
You mean, it won't run NetBSD?
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What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output
The beagle/panda series has a HDMI connector (though the signal on it is apparently only DVI, not sure if the same is true of the pi).
What is really unique about the Pi is the price. Afaict the sheevaplug is $99+shipping and the begleboard is arround $140 (the beagleboard is sold through distributors)
As a beagleboard owner afaict the biggest issue is storage, SD cards SUCK at handling the random access workloads that come from tasks like updating packages.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You, sir, are one of the few sane ones here.
It probably could, but you wouldn't get graphics acceleration for it. (proprietary driver). It may be able to do windows 8 (but only in metro mode)
Seriously, I would install a dozen of these type B boards in a case, only use a single power supply, a Ethernet switch and make a low power blade server. I think the power / speed / price ratio would work out. Add a NAS for storage, and you could have a fairly powerful blade for a fraction of the big boys. BOM works out to 12 x 35 = 420. Add a case / PS, Switch. Boot from SD and store everything on a NAS (add extra cost for storage). There's a lot to like about these boards. I think they could be a game changer.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
I'm thinking about adding monitors to my pc with raspberry pi and symergy2.source forge.net. I hope I can do network over the USB power