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First Run of Raspberry Pi Boards To Be Completed Feb 20th
An anonymous reader writes "Raspberry Pi has confirmed the first batch of $35 PCs will be constructed on February 20. They've also coaxed Broadcom into releasing the datasheet for the board. Apparently the company hit a snag with the quartz crystal package so there was a manufacturing delay, but it's since been resolved and things are on schedule for later this month."
From the announcements: "Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month."
Hot damn, it's about time. Maybe then we won't see so many Pi stories?
I even want to buy one and I'm tired of the stories.
For Asian markets, why dont they ship directly from China instead of moving them to UK first and then shipping them to their destinations
Infact, for all non EU destinations wont it make more sense to ship directly from China?
Will avoid multiple customs duties as well. (no customs will need to be paid for the UK entry)
Raspberry Pi has confirmed the first batch of $35 PCs will be constructed on February 20
To save any ambiguity, the actual release says:
The good news is that this finally means we have a date for the first batch: the boards will be finished on February 20
Troll, but:
Don't have a TomTom then?
Or one of the thousands of set-top boxes that use it?
Don't have a TV from a big-name manufacturer (e.g. Sony to name one) with media capabilities?
Don't have a Kindle?
Don't have an Android phone?
Seems to me that Sony, Kindle, Android, TomTom are all big-names and all in the consumer market where almost everyone has at least one themselves, or certainly know someone with one. That's without even trying to dig for more information, too.
P.S. How's Windows Phone coming along?
It doesn't ship with Linux. Or any other operating system. You can buy an SD card with Linux pre-installed, but that's a separate purchase.
We appreciate your prediction that it has a good chance of succeeding.
Anyone read the broadcom SOC doc in detail? I won't lie and claim I read the whole two hundred pages in detail but I did page thru it. Has anyone found any reason why it was secret? Superficially I've found nothing shocking or amazing. Sometimes there is something "new" which is cool and amazing. Think back to the first time you wrote a 16550 driver. The funniest thing I've found so far is a little example on page 11 where a 250 meg clock with a too-small implementation divider means you literally cannot run 300 baud RS232 with this dude. I liked reading about the GPIO system and the clocks that can drive them and spent at least 15 seconds thinking about how to drive a RC servo in hardware (not synthesizing level transitions in software, perhaps in an interrupt routine, but completely in hardware). I did something like that with a 68hc11 (I think?) back in the early 90s. The "real UART" vs the "mini UART" is kind of interesting/weird/worth looking at.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why prices below market equilibrium rates always lead to shortages.
Deleted
This sounds great for some enthusiasts, but to use this as your primary STB with no case (just bare board) sitting on my cabinet, come on.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
What does the quartz crystal do? Is it like the crystal radio I made when I was 9? Does the Pi do wi-fi via a cat's whisker? Or does the quartz crystal control the clock like my dad's wristwatch? Or is it a "healing crystal" for absorbing the dangerous electromagnetic radiation that the Pi almost certainly emits. Wait, it says the "quartz crystal package". Does the Pi come embedded in a crystal???
Please excuse me for not being geek enough to know this already. I had no idea that computer boards had quartz crystals on them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But here's the wiki link anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator
I'd love to have one with more than 128 or 256MB ram. I wonder if the Broadcom SOC design allows for piggybacking a larger chip on top? I'm sure a model B with 1GB of RAM wouldn't be out of the question at a price point of $50. I realize we're just going more and more "I want" in price but I think it would be nice to have that extra headroom
or you can download an image from the foundation
or is that the empire and foundation
where's azimov when you need him.
who where what when now?
where's azimov when you need him.
The same place he's been since April 1992, dust in the wind. After his death his body was cremated and his ashes were not interred.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's not quite the Apple TV, Boxee or Roku killer... yet. While the SoC supports a fair number of codecs, only a small number are licensed at this point (see the Pi FAQ), and if you have hopes for Flash and Silverlight based streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) , that's not going to happen unless Chrome or Firefox release a browser with embedded support.
P.S. How's Windows Phone coming along?
I don't know by my iPhone is kicking my Droids ass. Not that Android is really open source anyway.
The "VideoCore IV" (aka BCM2763) is hardly mentioned, so the answer is that this document doesn't include the interesting parts. When they say it could be used to port a new OS to the chip, that port wouldn't include any interesting [accelerated] video output.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Is it just me or has all the hype caused anyone else to just wait for the 2nd gen?
your missing many facts. on the other hand, if your travelling and your phone requires an update how do you do it ? my android does not lock itself if it wants an update, oh and jobs has passed on, its not a real apple anymore.
(troll) LOOOG!!!!!@
btw stop being negative, each user has (gender applicable here) own preferance, apple android, who cares. ps3 xbox who cares. its all about the money in the end. hey do you like green money or money? most people will say money. cause they don't care what color it is as long as its MONEY!
I say support the devs, not the companys, they make enough CASH MONEY from the media deals. (thats right coke and pepsi i'm looking at you.)
http://www.elektor.com/products/kits-modules/modules/070039-91-software-defined-radio.91475.lynkx
http://sdr-radio.com/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Any truly innovative bits will be patented.
Any non-innovative bits can generally be reverse engineered for relatively little money, by buying a device, and having it closely analysed.
The notion that the manual being secret buys you anything much, once the device is released is basically laughable.
The OS is a free (as in beer) download if you want to use your own SD, or you can buy an SD with the S preinstalled.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Raspberry is not open. we don't have it's schematic or hardware documentation. Hence it is not fully hackable. It is also pretty much locked to particular chipset. The chipset may get pulled by broadcom any time. They should typically have relied on chipsets like the OMAP that is well documented and understood by a large number of developers. Well, I hope someone else takes the cue and builds on this one....
I think of this as an advanced arduino and a bit more. NOT as a replacement for a PC. I think it should be the basis for 'doing cool things' - by kids or adults. I expect lots of hardware add-ons will be made, and many of these made for resale. I plan on ordering two model Bs at launch, and then model As as needed. There's lots of projects I have in mind for them. I don't think I am alone in wanting to use these for "cool stuff" - I don't think these are meant to be a replacement for the OLPC.
I like the model A because it gives me the option to not pay for what I am not going to use. In some cases, the datacomm will be via radio (wifi, hf ham) and so an ethernet board would be a waste. In other cases, I will be using littlle ram, 128mb should be plenty. I'd hope that model C, or some other model sometime soon, will be one aimed at very low cost ($15? $18?), while still providing an open architecture...and not some faster one with more ram and more USB ports. I'd like to see a model, be it this same model C I describe above, made to consume very little power, and have a wide operating temperature range, so that I can use it in remote locations for sensor networks. What also might be fun, though I am not considering this very practical, is one with a single ISA slot, so I can play with some old industrial controller boards I have lying around. or hey, maybe an S-100 bus!
I've been spoiled with linux on modern machines, so I don't have much experience running it in resource-strapped environments. Do you think I could run this machine as a file server if I put a text-mode linux distro on it?
Just because your (and my) phone hardware manufacturer put some closed source pieces of code on our android OS based phones does not mean Android, the google project, is closed source. It's very much open source. Download it here: http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html
What do you mean when you say it's not open source?
I've played with a similar idea a little myself, one thought I had is what if you were every file is "named" in a canonical form that includes all applied tags such as /c_tag/a_tag/someFile#b_tag /b_tag/a_tag/c_tag/someFile
someFile#a_tag#b_tag#c_tag
but could also be accessed with some/all of the tags are included in the "directory tree" instead
or
They key point being that *all* tags are *always* included in the complete file path, either as part of the "directory tree" or as part of the "file name", thus eliminating any ambiguity. Obviously you can't have two files with the exact same name and tags, but that's fairly analogous to the current "no duplicate file names in the same directory" rule.
The one problem I can see with this approach is the potential to exceed permitted file name lengths for the hierarchical file system being emulated, though I think most modern file systems allow file names longer than the entire file path usually consumes. One workaround would be to replace the tags with a composite hash In which case you might get something more like someFile#E5QM7DN3, obviously much less legible, but at least more likely to be a legal file name (especially if you truncated the someFile part as much as necessary to ensure that fact) . Perhaps a hybrid approach that includes as many of the (most common?) tags as possible in the file name for legibility purposes:
someFile#a_tag#b_tag#E5QM7DN3 == a_tag/c_tag/someFile#b_tag#x_tag#E5QM7DN3
I would also suggest that user account tags be treated specially, even if it's just something like reserving the ~ character for ownership tags, just so that it's easy to distinguish between
a_file#~Bob#Steve - Bob's file regarding Steve, and
a_file#~Steve#Bob - Steve's file regarding Bob
especially since in most cases you'd want to limit Bob's results to his own files (and those he has access to)
Hmm, if ownership were tracked that way it has the interesting effect of making it easy to transparently allow multiple owners of a file without groups: sharedFile#~Bob#~Steve
Just tell me when MAME and a decent front-end are available for it, complete with FAT32 SD card, 44.1KHz, 16-bit, stereo audio, 60Hz framerate and USB HID joystick support.
On my bookshelf. Isn't he on yours?
Free Martian Whores!
They'll give you the BOM and the schematics. If you're making a commercial product from this, spin your own board. You'd want to do that anyways unless you happen to make rectangular widgets in the first place. And if you need WiFi tack that on yourself. They provide the kernel code too so all you have to do is add the driver yourself.
Think of the RasPi as a dinky devboard rather than some finished something you'd put in a product and you'll be on the right track.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Will the $35 version (more memory, faster cpu) be able to run asterisk or trixbox, maybe 2-3 users, 1/2 dozen extensions, 1 hylafax/fax?
(no more than 2-3 simultaneous users, plus the occasional fax coming in while users on voice calls)
Thanks!
How about you get me the (legal) source for honeycomb? That's right,bitch.
Sorry, but Apple is pounding your little pet mobile OS in the fucking ass. But I hear open source fucktards like taking it in the ass anyway.
LOLZzzzZZ!!!!onehundredeleven!!!!
From what I can gather broadcom don't like dealing with small customers so if you are planning to grab a design chunk for your own design and you aren't shipping a huge number of units you might want to look elsewhere.
Plus for smaller runs it may well be cheaper to just buy the pis (and sit them on a support board made on a cheap 2 layer process that adds any extra hardware you need) than to design and have built a board of that caliber.
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 don't think you've grasped what type of markets this will be selling to, namely, nerds and education. Everyone I know who's interested in this and counting down the days to availability, knows what it is, what it's generally capable of and more importantly, have a thousand and one potential uses for it already. The types of people buying these are the types of people who will put them to good use, or at least have a lot of fun playing with them.
A cheap as chips Linux box, with HDMI, audio, USB, networking, SD card reader, GPIO, small enough to fit almost anywhere and consuming just a few watts under full load. Isn't this nerd heaven for Slashdot readers?
So, just for future reference, I'll also put my "told you so" stake in the ground here and predict that in just a few months there will be many thousands of happy customers and a thriving community of developers, modders and hobbyists.
I'm not completely sold on how far reaching these will go within the education system, but I'm sure we'll be reading about some pretty cool Raspberry Pi projects by school kids in the not too far distant future too.