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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!"
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 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
From the FAQs there will be cases and mounting options just not on initial release. http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
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?
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.
does it blend?
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.
Go away. If you've been following the website you'll see they're around 3 weeks behind schedule but have finished the whole design process and are now testing the hardware before mass production. Do you even know what vaporware is?
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.
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