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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."
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?
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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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.
I suspect that(while they will probably be of assistance to geeks brewing their own) this will suffer the same fate as all the prior 'automated house' widgetry(a market at which they've been hammering for bloody ages now, with comparatively little success).
Suitably motivated geeks, with some major time and pains, and more money than they initially expected to shell out, will indeed hammer out home automation systems. Fundamentally, home automation is a series of really-not-all-that-ghastly problems in AC wiring, switching, sensors, and logic. It will be utterly non-inter-operable with anything else(save perhaps the geek's cellphone of choice, for which he will build a website/app, and possibly an appliance or two into which he will hack directly. Nothing else.)
Joe User, on the other hand, will discover that specific home automation products(eg. cheap programmable thermostats) can be purchased at any hardware store; but more sophisticated systems either pretty much suck, enough that they are really just starting parts for dedicated geeks(eg. X10), or can be purchased, from an installer, in one big, shiny, expensive, bespoke, proprietary package. It'll start at $10,000, be really slick, and interoperate with absolutely nothing that isn't itself.
The various utility companies attempting to deploy "smart meters" for some combination of PR, easier meter reading, and customer behavior metrics will utterly ignore this, since it doesn't comply with their alphabet soup of semi-open-for-interoperability's-sake-but-not-at-all-talked-about-outside-the-industry-or-intended-for-you-to-know-anything-about wireline and wireless protocols(their status seems rather analogous to the state of various 'standards' in the wireless telco wars. Some of them are just totally proprietary, dreamed up by some company large enough that its service area qualifies as a large scale deployment. Others, GSM-like, are standardized cross-industry things; but are really not intended to be fiddled with by end users.
All in all, no difference:
There will still be nothing resembling manufacturer support for appliances that can report and control intelligently(as opposed to just having an external relay cut them on and off, with the exception of a few horrible manufacturer gimmicks that will probably be badly broken and tied to some manufacturer 'portal'. Geeks will continue to homebrew functional, if slightly rough, systems; and it will still be possible to buy very shiny, tightly integrated, totally proprietary widgets for large buildings and custom installs of various sorts.
What dogs 'the automated house' seems not to be a lack of cheap computing power(wireless and fast CPUs certainly helps; but ASM coded PICs communicating over some primitive serial bus through your house's telephone wiring back in the late 80's could have handled it, with some sort of frontend/master-control widget similar to the x86/DOS based CNC machine control systems that persist to this day. Expensive? Yeah. Doable? Yeah.) It seems to be a combination of limited incremental benefit(power just doesn't cost that much, in many locations, doing it manually works OK, for most tasks, setup is currently complex, many locations charge residential customers the same for on and off peak power, so who cares?), complete lack of anything resembling standardization(minimal standardization of even simple things like remote control switches, never mind any sort of direct intelligence built into appliances that can be exposed. PCs have it, in a somewhat clusterfucked way, with ACPI; and some individual devices, like higher end furnaces, might have a manufacturer specific control panel on an HTTP server somewhere; but everything else is largely silent), and some degree of sinister intent by certain entities(the intentions of the power-rationing, 'consumer-metric'-gathering, and similar 'smart-meter' entities are largely not in your interest...)
It's a pity: If it were a primarily technological problem, technology would have curb-stomped it by now. It isn't.
Arduino programming language (Processing) is very similar to Python or interpreted C.
No, arduino programming is NOT very similar to python at all. Its not even close.
Arduino's native programming languages are C, C++ (with some limitations), and AVR assembler. That's it. The confusion comes from the fact Arduino purposely attempts to obscufate the fact you are using realatively low level languages behind a nice, high level API. None of these are close to python.
When I first started using Arduinos, it took me a week before I figured out the imaginary "script language" everyone talks about, which I could never seem to find, doesn't actually exist. Its completely imaginary. Its 100% marketing and obscufation for C and C++.