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Raspberry Pi Gertboard In Action
An anonymous reader writes with news from Geek.com on an expansion board for the Raspberry Pi. Quoting: "In the middle of December last year the Raspberry Pi Foundation made a surprising announcement that not only would we see the $25 PC released in 2012, it would also be getting an expansion board ... called the Gertboard, and is being developed by Broadcom employee Gert van Loo in his spare time. When completed, it will allow Raspberry Pi owners to play around with flashing LEDs, electric motors, and a range of different sensors. It effectively takes the $25 Raspberry Pi beyond just being a very cheap PC. There's a video of the Gertboard already working which demonstrates the 12 LEDs being lit up and the board powering an electric motor more than capable of lifting something like your garage door."
Take that, Arduino.
I'm very excited about this.
Especially as a learning tool for my kids, I think that by seeing what is happening they'll get very excited about learning to program.
I already have arduino boards, but it's not the same thing. Here we have a completely self-contained computer with great practical I/O interfaces.
Plug it into your tv or ancient flatscreen. Wifi signal your video feed over the air for 25usd and some coding.
I think your imagination is useless.
Arduino doesn't run Linux.
This is more similar to a BeagleBone prototype cape - except with the Gertboard don't expect to be able to use any features in the chip that aren't put into the kernel by Eben and Gert. Unlike the CPU in the Arduino (ATMegaXX8) and the CPU in the BeagleBone (TI AM335x), the technical reference manual for the Broadcom chip in the Pi is completely unavailable. If support for anything is left out of the kernel, whether intentionally or simply due to lack of time, you will not be able to implement it yourself. If support for anything is broken in the kernel, you will have to live with it due to lack of documentation and the fact that Broadcom never comments their damn kernel code for anything. (Look at the BCM4330 driver for mobile devices as an example - if it misbehaves, you're screwed.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Soldering a 1.27mm pitch SMT component is really easy, it takes about the same amount of time as a DIP component, and is much, much, smaller.
No.
Perhaps to a seasoned EE or hobbyist who gets his hands dirty on a daily basis, but otherwise, no.
The best way to turn the Raspberry Pi to shit (apart from its name - "Acorn", the obvious predecessor to this whole project, sounded much better) would be to set the bar at a level which assumes you already know what you're doing before you've even started.
It IS in production, it just hasn't come out of the production pipeline yet. The working beta boards (with a hand-applied last-minute fix) are being auctioned off, proceeds for the charity recipients for which Raspberry Pi was created: making classroom computing happen.
I will be happy to buy a bunch when they're available too, but let's watch the development. As for Tesla, did you buy the Roadster, seeing as how it's been available in showrooms for some time now?
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Who are these people who keep on insisting on using through-hole components? That board could easily be the same size as the Raspberry-pi board itself simply by using SOIC packages as opposed to DIP for all of the ICs. Soldering a 1.27mm pitch SMT component is really easy, it takes about the same amount of time as a DIP component, and is much, much, smaller.
Its a meme that just won't die. As a guy who's been doing SMD at home on and off since the 80s for ham radio microwave gear, it gets tiring hearing for about three decades that what I find easy to do and enjoyable is "impossible" and will be the "death of homebrewing" and all that rot. Its right up there with "PL-259s are impossible to install" and "power poles are impossible to install", you only hear about it over and over from the 0.1% of the population who really can't do it.
I'm willing to bet there are some very young hardware hackers on /. right now emulating their elders by rambling about how impossible it is to do SMD at home, despite my experience doing it for years before they were born.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There are some aspects that are redundant but there is a lot more that is not. Here are some major differences:
Arduinos do not run Linux. Their code is written in Assembly, C or C++ but WITHOUT the STL. There is no OS or kernel. It's pure monolithic code running on a Atmel Atmega328, ATmega2560 or similar processor. They support Analog I/O, Digital I/O, I2C, SPI, 1-wire, EEPROM, Serial communication via digital i/o lines or Serial over USB, typical 16Mhz clock speed and 8k of RAM, 32-256K of program storage. It probably uses slightly less power than the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi do run Linux. Their code is written in any language supported by an ARM 1176JZF-S CPU with a Linux kernel such as Assembly, C, C++ with STL, Python, Perl, etc. There is a OS such as Debian, Arch with more to follow and a Linux kernel. Code written is traditional Linux code running in a multi-tasking system such as Linux provides. It's run on an ARM 1176JZF-S CPU. They support Digital I/O I2C, SPI, Serial communication via digital i/o (gpio) lines, SD card support, composite video out, HDMI video out, RCA audio out. 700Mhz clock speed, 128-256MB of RAM, 1-32GB of program storage (depending of SD card size).
Unlike the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino cannot be developed on by itself. It requires another computer running Linux, OS X or Windows in order to develop on them.
The Gertboard is more akin to what an Arduino shield is for an Arduino. It's just something you plug into a Raspberry Pi to provide access to more of the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi's SOC and it has some convenience functionality like LEDs built-in. Like an Arduino shield, it's optional. You can still use GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi without it.
*disclaimer* I work for Broadcom in the team that did 2835, however I am not involved with the Pi, so posted anon to not to be accused of karma-ing
Reasons For through hole:
1) Hobbyists aren't scared of them - some are scared of SMT (and some SMT is used on Gertboard)
2) Requires less skilled soldering - yes a skilled solderer can do smt with ease, but half the point of this project is that it should be unintimidating to everyone.
3) More mechanically sturdy. Useful for many hobby projects
The Pi mainboard got in trouble for being none through-hole, and not available as a kit of parts, now Gertboard is in trouble for being exactly that.
*sigh* this is why we can't have nice things.
The Raspberry Pi is a good litmus test for imagination. If you read or talk about it and have a tingle, you have an imagination. If you think it's pointless, you're dead inside.
Arduino and Raspberry Pi are not competators in any way. They target two different markets whereby they have very slight overlap for hobbiests. The Pi simply can not compete with Arduino/AVR on the low end and Arduino/AVR can not compete with RPi on the highend. There's only a tiny intersection between the two and that's likely only because you have one or the other whereby a "close enough" solution is satisfactory.
AVR/Arduino has solutions in the $1-$6 range, if you want to use an inexpensive ISP and break out the coresponding pins on your bare bones or really bare bones controller. Not to mention, the pins are easy to access with a multitude of more pins available. It also has some capabilities which are simply not available without a Gert board, which makes the pi all the more expensive. Furthermore, an RPi is basically as barebones as you're going to see - at least for a while - if ever. Whereas for the AVR/Arduino solution makes it easy to transplant your Arduino project into a barebones $3-$9 project.
Furthermore, these two projects are really far and away much more complimentary technologies than they are competators. Basically, let the RPi do the heavy CPU lifting and the AVR's do the GPIO and bit flipping. Its a combination made in heaven.