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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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
one thought I had is what if you were every file is "named" in a canonical form that includes all applied tags such as someFile#a_tag#b_tag#c_tag
I had been thinking of something similar to that (actually reporting the file in "/a_tag/" as being named "b_tag/c_tag/somefile" which would preserve the file extension at the end for programs that need it, and would actually be "mostly" compatible with programs (since from the a_tag "directory" b/c/file would be a proper path) but the problem is that it would likely confuse programs which track the working directory. The program would think of itself being in "a_tag" and may not save the file back to the b_tag/c_tag/ "subdirectory", but part of the allure of the set based filesystem is that the files would be accessible without being completely specified (being able to see all of my music, or all of my music of an artist, or all in a genre or all by an artist in a genre and so on) so this is a conundrum either way.
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
That's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of since I had been thinking of tags being subtractive permissions (ie an untagged file would be fully accessible, by tagging it ~Qzukk it takes away certain permissions, then by tagging it mail it took away other permissions as well, etc. In that case, tagging it ~Bob and ~Steve would mean nobody would have it), and now I see trying to set up useful group permissions this way would really be a beast. With additive permissions I had been worried about giving way more than you wanted, instead I was stuck on a system where it was impossible to give away everything you needed!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.