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Raspberry Pi Has Gone To Manufacturing
alecclews writes "After weeks of waiting, the Raspberry Pi foundation, who are creating a $25 computer to bootstrap computing education, has flipped the switch on manufacturing. They had wanted to build the board in the UK but it turns out to be uneconomic."
After all of the accusations of vapourware, it's nice that they're actually making these.
To Eben, Liz and crew: Congratulations! Looking forward to watching you revolutionize computer education!
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
I'll luck out and get one of the first 10,000. There's going to be a mad dash on their sales page when they finally start selling them.
Reading the post (I really suggest everyone does so, it's an enlightening read), I have to say this sounds particularly worrying. The government and local manufacturers almost seemed intent on stopping them from doing the work locally. Does that even make sense?
I can understand higher costs; the West won't accept salaries below a certain threshold, there's unions, and I entirely respect that. However, the schedule problem is ridiculous. A plant thousands of kilometers away from your main sales point can be faster to ramp up production than the shop down the street? We're not speaking about a small-scale project, either! I find this utterly unbelieveable. No wonder so much of the manufacturing goes overseas.
And then the taxing part is plain and simply dumb. You can't control corporations, but that the government actively deters local production? That's like shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why it hurts.
The UK and the West as a whole (I'm entirely sure that the UK is not a special case here) should be ashamed.
I was checking this out last night and I'm actually quite excited for one to come out. I've been in the industry for years now but more on the superuser side. It'll be a really fun chance to actually have a computer where I have to learn some electronics and programming to really get the most use out of it... kind of like jumping into the deep end of the pond. It'll be my main home computer.
as long as you keep all the 'prison labor' and 'no environmental groups, no labor unions' stuff, and get rid of all the 'social safety net stuff'.
I usually recommend a USB flash drive for my students in my Unix course (taught on Macs at the school), and leave it up to them which Linux distro to run at home from the Flash drive. With prices this low, I could almost make it a requirement for the course. I'll hold off to see how they fare though.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
There's a good chance the motivation is financial. As in IT people threatened by their charges becoming disposable. Or software developers well aware their software is incompatible. Moderation on Rpi threads has gotten brutal, and so now most everybody posts AC.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
heh. without unions you would see a lot of work return to the UK ... like children working in coal mines and toxic garbage dumps.... just like children do in asia.
Could be talking about the CuBox (http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox) which wikipedia tells us has begun shipment.
Actually, yeah, which USB PCs?
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.
Similarly, real computers aren't small enough to trivially embed them into random crap around your house. I can think of lots of really fun pranks to pull with one of these and a small speaker.... :-D But then again, that's hobbyist stuff.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
there is no need for democracy in communist China, because the people are already represented in government by the Communist Party.
funny corollary: There is no need for independent labor unions in China, because the government controlled labor union inherently represents the people's interests - after all, it too is controlled by the Communist Party.
as for the basic facts of history about unions and working conditions, well, you are just 100%, flat out wrong. i mean, its like you have tried to lecture me on mathematics by starting out with "the volume of a sphere is r cubed". no, its not r cubed. its not, its not even close, and any 3rd grader knows it from basic examination of the universe that is plain to their god given eyeballs.
You could say the same thing about the Arduino vs. one of thousands of sub-$2 microcontrollers.
For quick hack-it-together devices, I'd rather have a cheap linux computer with some gpio pins that I can access via something like /dev/port0 than an arduino. I'm not sure that this Raspberry Pi is the perfect solution to that, but it's closer to what I want than a arduino is, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than hacking something together out of an old laptop or mini-itx board.
If I'm going to go back to playing with microcontrollers, I'm going to be working from a bare chip, custom boards, and assembly language, because to me, that was fun.
Arduinos have their place. This thing has its place. There might be some overlap, but there's a lot of situations where you'd pick one over the other. Choice is good, right?
If you have kids, I'll bet you'd be more willing to let them take a soldering iron to a $25 machine than a $250 machine.
For what it is worth, generational change does improve the attitudes in society over time. For example, 20 years ago you would not have seen major governments even pay lip service to the problem of global climate change. In another 20 years that may actually take it seriously. I believe change happens as reactionary people die.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The app store is called apt-get.
If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all.
Tax and duty are two different things. Anyone care to explain the actual situation there? Sounds like they're confused, at least.
Is there a specific semiconductor duty that doesn't apply to finished goods? (not sure that a board like this would count as 'finished' anyway, for duty purpose)
If they're bitching about VAT, I don't see how that would be any different, completed unit or not.
The only difference I can see is more margin on Chinese produced version, barring there is no duty on semis, as mentioned above... Which any idiot would well know, by walking into a wal-mart.
Only if your project requires no CPU. Consider an autonomous bot learning a path through a maze. With an Arduino, you might be able to do a passable job using a series of stepper motors with counters, but with this, you could connect a webcam and do computer vision analysis.
Also, with an Arduino, you're limited in your ability to interact with it. Although it might be possible to cram a TCP/IP stack into the thing, it would be pretty tight. With this thing, you could ssh into it over a Wi-Fi connection (with an external adapter), update the software remotely, and keep on going.
And you're memory-constrained with an Arduino. I realize that back in the day of assembly language über-hackers, it wasn't a big deal to cram amazing programs into tiny little chunks of RAM, but it's not a programming skill that's particularly useful in this day and age, and it makes more sense to teach people programming skills that more accurately map onto what they will see in the real world. This means having more than just a few kilobytes of RAM. Why would anyone want to squeeze their code down enough to work in such a resource-constrained environment if they don't have to?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't think the removal of Ethernet from the Model A is just about building down to a price.
I know that if I approached the network manager at my school and said "I want to buy 30 linux computers that pupils can use to write and execute their own code. Oh and by the way they all need network access", he'd have a blue fit!
I could see us buying a few model B's to teach the sixth-formers about networking, but for general use in my school the model A would be a much easier sell to the powers that be.
If you're looking for x86 SOC, Intel's new Medfield might be your best bet. Medfield article
If you were to give these the Raspberry Pi treatment...let's say a Pi board's cost is 1/2 cpu, 1/2 everything else. So the everything else is about...rounding up....let's say about 15 bucks. So add about $15 to whatever Intel charges for Medfield and you'd have your x86 Raspberry Pi.
It will be more expensive than $25 total, because...well...Intel is involved. No way a Medfield chipset will sell for ten bucks. But it would still be cheap and let you run Wine or other groovy stuff on a dinky cheap board.
It might be close though. I found this atom board for $57, and that's a full motherboard with a lot of expensive slots and heat sinks and the like. The actual Atom chip probably isn't more than $15-20 bucks. If Medfield is in this ballpark you could still be pretty cheap.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
China is an agrarian society, so most of the poor people are farmers. The land ownership is a very controlled system but the short version is that those poor farmers can't actually sell their land (as it technically belongs to the government) but they can lease it away for a few years. When a poor farmer decides that he wants to leave to a city to seek better wages, he leases his farm to someone, thus gains a bit of money to start the new life with and might or might not find a better paying job. If he does find factory work, he can make some more permanent arrangement about the farm and if he doesn't... he can return to continue his old life!
The system is a bit unusual but it actually works pretty well. It's the main reason why Chinese cities don't have shantytowns, etc. similar to those of most developing countries.
Bit annoyed that it's not made in the UK.
Why? Manufacturing them overseas lowers the price and makes them more accessible to students. IIRC the Raspberry Pi Foundation's stated goal is to teach children programming, not to bolster a failing industry at the expense of educators and hobbyists.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Not economical?
They explain this at the end of the article. One of the major factors is that there tax reductions for importing manufactured systems but not for components!!! Write to your MP today.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
You've already found its greater purpose: To entice kids to become computer hobbyists at the programmer level, not just as websurfers & gamers.
Think about it, there really isn't anything inexpensive and capable enough in the current market to hit that niche.
It's not VAT. VAT, as you point out is just a percentage of the price (so importing assembled goods you'd pay more VAT).
It's Customs duty:
Customs duty is a tax charged on importation of goods produced outside the European Union (EU). [...]
Customs Duty is charged as a percentage of the total value of the goods - that is the sterling equivalent of the price paid abroad.
To work out the percentage, each type of product is given a 'commodity code'. This tells you what the Customs Duty rate percentage is for that particular product, based on whether it's being imported or exported.
There are around 14,000 different classifications. The duty rate percentage for each may vary according to the country the goods come from. The average percentage is between 5 and 9 per cent, but it can be as low as 0 per cent or as high as 85 per cent.
To find out the Customs Duty rate for a product you can contact HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) VAT Helpline or the Customs, International Trade & Excise enquiries.
The UK customs duty appears to be based on the EU TARIC, so the choice of rates on particular goods may not be up to the UK (alone) to decide.
The TARIC database is online at http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/dds2/taric/taric_consultation.jsp?Lang=en#
An assembled Rasberry Pi is probaly an "8471":
SECTION XVI MACHINERY AND MECHANICAL APPLIANCES; ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT; PARTS THEREOF; SOUND RECORDERS AND REPRODUCERS, TELEVISION IMAGE AND SOUND RECORDERS AND REPRODUCERS, AND PARTS AND ACCESSORIES OF SUCH ARTICLES
CHAPTER 84 NUCLEAR REACTORS, BOILERS, MACHINERY AND MECHANICAL APPLIANCES; PARTS THEREOF
8471 Automatic data-processing machines and units thereof; magnetic or optical readers, machines for transcribing data onto data media in coded form and machines for processing such data, not elsewhere specified or included
I'm not sure where components are - it's a real mish-mash.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The Arduino has only a serial output. In order to do any work on it from more than a few feet away, you'd need to plug it into a networked computer of some sort. With the raspberry pi, that networking is already built in.
Install, leave it someplace and forget it. Do Anonymous a favor and place random stealth TOR exit nodes the world over with bifferboard and the like.
it's probably more geared toward people that want to geek out but can't afford to.
Computers in schools have been taken over by IT departments and many parents would not want their kids "geeking out" on their main computer. Most kids can't afford to buy their own regular computers even in first world countries. Furthermore regular computers do not come set up to encourage programming. Programming environments are an optional extra (admittedly often a free one now but still you have to find and install them) and modern PCs make interfacing with your own hardware a PITA on both a hardware (paralell ports are fast dissapearing) and software (the NT line doesn't like you doing low level port access, there are hacks but....) perspective.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well said.
Thatcher can be criticized for a lot of things (Poll Tax, etc). But people forget that she was a Chemist (Scientist) before she entered politics, and has always loved a good bit of tech.
http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/07/margaret-thatcher-chemistpolitician.html
http://alicerosebell.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/thatcher-scientist/
Have a nice day!
Unfortunately the Pi has very little GPIO. It's one of the compromises they made to keep the cost down (AIUI the chip has lots more GPIO but bringing it out would have required more layers). You may be able to hook up some specific shields that don't require much IO but afaict the only way you are going to make a generic "pi to ardunio shield adaptor" is to include either IO expanders or a microcontroller in it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
what is your take with this device making up a beowulf cluster?
If you want to learn about running a cluster and go for it.
If you want to get computing done just buy a bloody i5 2500 and stick it on a cheap H61 mobo. The i5 has 4 cores at over four times the clockspeeds. So assuming the two architectures give similar performance per clock (i'd expect sandy bridge is faster but I dunno for sure) the i5 should be equivilent to over 16 pis. Further the Pi is limited by a USB based network connection.
I'd expect the real cost of a Pi model B to be over £30 once you add in VAT, shipping, SD card, network cable and USB cable (to cut up and connect to your PSU).
You can get an i5 2500 with mobo, 8GB ram and 8GB SSD for under £300 including VAT and delivery and as above i'd expect it to thrash a cluster of 10 Pis.
You will need a PSU either way. You may or may not want some form of case. If you do I'd expect a case for a standard PC would work out cheaper than a case for a cluser of Pis. You may or may not need additional storage (on top of the boot drives I included above) either way.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register