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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 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.
From the FAQs there will be cases and mounting options just not on initial release. http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
What the heck is the attraction of these stupid mini and micro USB connectors anyway?
The Raspberry heads stated that they wanted to be compatible with cheap phone chargers...
Yes you can. I've seen a machine that does it.
Perhaps you missed it, but Broadcom is selling them the silicon by tacking it on to larger production runs, so they've got as much as they want at quantity pricing.
They've already bought the other parts so sourcing isn't a problem(for the first 10k anyway).
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/302
And clearly they've got the marketing down, otherwise you wouldn't be discussing it:)
From what I gather - that was more because they had so much demand, they figured it was sensible to use market forces rather than have way more orders than they can handle. Jolly sensible, if you ask me - they get some capital from the initial sales, early buyers can still get it, people who would have bought it early, but don't care *that* much can wait a bit, get it at the advertised price. Better than having them all sold out for the first 4 months, making who gets it a random luck thing, and not gaining from it.
It *is* making "good progress". But where these types of projects usually hang up is when they finally get to the stage where they need to put together the infrastructure to source parts, manufacture, and market the *product*. At this point, they generally realize that they just don't have the organization and resources necessary, and the sub-$100 price point is out-the-window unrealistic for the volume they can realistically project to move...
I think Raspberry Pi's price goal is pretty ambitious but at the same time it's not outrageous. It's basically running the same parts you'd find in any cheap ass media player. You can pick up media players for less than $100 and if you cut out the case, packaging, power supply, application software, optional software licences (e.g. AC3, Dolby), reseller margins, and just ship the barebones product you could do it for the price they're proposing. Or if not exactly then not far off it.
The charging specification does not require enumeration.
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs
Battery Charging Specification, Revision 1.2
Section 1.4.7
Try to keep up.