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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!"
Itâ(TM)s essentially a microprocessor project board, of which there are both many and more âoematureâ already around. As to the price-point, watch for that to change to a more realistic number as the Pi Team faces the realities of sourcing the parts and finding a manufacturer. Bravo and all thatâ¦
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
Races other than blacks have been enslaved in the past, discriminated against, denied civil rights, mistreated, hated, and oppressed. But blacks as a group have the highest rates of anything like rates of violent crime (proportional), drug abuse, spousal abuse, children born out of wedlock, illiteracy, alcoholism, obesity (especially their women) and theft and simultaneously the lowest rates of high school graduation, home ownership, scientific achievements, business ownership and college degrees.
Like I said other races have faced terrible racism. Think of the Jews just to name a recent one. But the Jews do much better for themselves than the blacks and their worst persecution was much more recent than US black slavery. Unlike the blacks there's Jews alive today who remember the Holocaust. As a group, the Jews consistently beat the blacks on any of the metrics I wrote above. So do the whites. So do Asians.
The whole "oh noes its not their fault it's because of RACISM" really starts wearing thin. Maybe that (barely) explains one or two of the metrics above. It does not explain all of them. It does not explain why others who also faced racism do so much better, why they're more civilized and successful. It is a true valid comparison of apples and apples.
So WTF is wrong with black people? I mean if somebody does believe they are genetically inferior (true racism) they have a lot of justifications for feeling that way. It's not like they just woke up one day and said "hey I'm going to try something new, I am going to start hating black people!". No, they get the idea from seeing how most black people are and wondering if they're going to get mugged by some gang member for accidentally making eye contact.
I don't think it's genetics I think it's their anti-achievement culture. Any black person in the ghetto who wants to get out of the ghetto by bettering himself is harassed, intimidated, beaten up for "acting white". They keep themselves down. It's no one's fault but their own. It's as simple as that.
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.
Wikipedia says the point of these is to "inspire learning computer science". Do you really need one of these to day that? This things seems really pointless to me. If you really like computer science just write code on your home computer. If you really want to write code for embedded microcontrollers, you already have plenty of cheap (or as cheap as they can be) options.
This raspberry pi thing is rather pointless. In addition, this is neither news for nerds nor stuff that matters. Slow holidays Slashdot?
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?
as a short penis
thrusting inside receptive anus
come raspberry pi
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.
Why does slashdot never publish my comments? I've made several on several articles and I don't see any of them.
Do I get a raspberry pie or 3.14159 rasperrys?
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.
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.
does it blend?
The only reason to have that is to use a computer under right?
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.
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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
I know, but you should of just waited for the beeb to brain-fart it all over the network for it to be appealing & newsworthy.
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