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Electronics Prototyping Plate Kit Board For Raspberry Pi Coming Soon
An anonymous reader writes "Outside of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it seems work is being done to support the tiny PC with add-ons. One of the companies set to launch such a product is Adafruit, which has just announced an electronics plate kit for the device. The kit is currently in the prototype stages, but once released Adafruit is hoping to encourage people to use the board to prototype electronic circuits and create some embedded computer projects. It's certainly an idea that will excite those coming to the Raspberry Pi who have experience with Arduino."
O.K. - this is a selfish request for info I'm too lazy to look up for myself...
What's the ETA and source for direct connect digital camera support? I know there's USB support through the standard Linux stack, but there's that tantalizing little camera port on the Pi that gets mentioned every so often.
Will it support multiple cameras?
Will it support higher bandwidth than USB?
Will it have any decent general purpose driver support?
Is it just a phantom port like the one on the Beagle/Panda boards where there's not actually any camera on the market that connects to it?
My future four-eyed autonomous rover wants to know!
It's a pretty annoying oversight that the rpi board doesn't have any holes for mounting screws, so you'd hope that an add-on plate like this might correct that oversight.
But nope.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Try this: http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/slice-of-pi/
Or this: http://www.skpang.co.uk/catalog/raspberry-pi-cover-with-breadboard-area-red-p-1071.html
etc. I currently have the SKPang one for my Pi.
You know that the RPi is also manufactured in a third world country, likely in what looks like the other "slave farms" which manufacture electronics, right? They abandoned plans to produce it in the UK.
I was looking yesterday if some company expanding a little on Raspberry Pi. Add LCD, serial ports, connection for WiFi boards and you are on par with many dev boards and SBCs that are sold for hundreds of $$.
...except that will start pushing up the price, which is the Pi's way of grabbing attention.
Let's face it, there is nothing particularly revolutionary, hardware-wise, about the Pi. The important thing is that its so cheap that people will buy it first, and find out what it can do for them later. This is harking back to the days when the British PC market was dominated by British-designed machines like the BBC Model B - which the Pi makers invoke - and the Sinclair Spectrum/ZX81 which are actually more obviously relevant to the Pi because they were incredibly cheap. Actually, the BBC Micro was also incredibly cheap compared with the (inflated) UK price of an Apple II (the sensible comparison - the BBC ended up occupying the same niche in the UK that the Apple II did in the US), but it wasn't as affordable as the ZXs.
A more realistic way of teaching kids to program is to use Scratch, Python or (insert language of choice) on a regular desktop or a tablet - sandboxing it as a web app or a virtual machine if you worry about kids "breaking" things. You have to provide PSU, monitor, keyboard mouse, network to use a Pi, and there are other reasons for getting regular PCs or tablets onto kid's desks. However, if the Pi can generate interest by appealing to the ZX81 spirit then what's not to like?
The fly in the ointment is that its simply not economical to actually make the things in the UK.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.