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First Steps With the Raspberry Pi
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small, capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise." Beyond praise, though, this article details the hooking-up and mucking-about phases, and offers some ideas of what it's useful for.
A "cheap china-sourced device" smartphone would not do these things for me:
- Media Centre PC.
- MAME box capable of hooking up to my TV.
- Learning tool for programming, networking, and other computing stuffs (that is also incredibly easy to reformat if you balls anything up).
- Have GPIO ports so I can use it for some silly robotics/mechatronics projects.
Why not install Python on whatever computer is already around the house? Or Scratch? Or have them write JavaScript in the browsers they already use? I think that would be a more effective way to introduce them to computer programming.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Except for the last point ( thus my statement about external usb ) you can get all the above. HDMI output to your tv, bluetooth keyboards and mice. I am assuming you get an android phone here, and not a chinaOS type.
Now space might be an issue for your 'media' since you are limited to flash cards, but you can always stream from a file server over wifi..
Restoring firmware is pretty trivial too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Both suppliers are worldwide. Simply order one... although that will involve a waiting list at this point
Normal people worry me!
A real American would want Apple Pi.
Could you actually find me a smartphone with HDMI out (1080p), ability to use USB peripherals, and cost within 3x as much as the RPi?
Space is something I wouldn't bother comparing because I would stream to my RPi as well.
Restoring firmware on the RPi is a matter of formatting the SD card, most phones are quite easily permanently bricked.
Is the Broadcom datasheet freely available for the SoC? In my experience, Broadcom is evil when it comes to forking over the exact specs and interfacing requirements for its chips. If there's no datasheet for the SoC, then my enthusiasm for tinkering with one of these is basically nil. Still a neat little gadget, I suppose.
"As a resident of the USA, how can I get one of these things?"
Wait a month and get a Via APC instead.
For $14 more than the Pi, you get twice as much RAM, a better operating system (a flavor of Android 2.3), a better CPU, 2GB of on board flash for your OS (and of course it has the obligatory MicroSD slot as well), plus standard VGA and HDMI out, 4 USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, and standard audio in/out jacks.
The video probably isn't quite as good as the Pi (it maxes at 720p), but who is going to be doing sophisticated video with these devices anyway, at this stage? It's a hobbyist board.
Make your own secure file repository, joining the cloud computing revolution?
Last I checked, that's called a file server. Not the "cloud computing revolution."
Agreed - if you want a Pi that also has camera, GPS, wi-fi, 3G radio, mic, speaker, LED light, touchscreen, keyboard, battery, and a case, I've bought Android phones as cheap as $29 off-contract. They make fantastic do-anything devices, from remote cameras to GPS trackers, and all you have to do is download an app off the Market. There are also Android SoCs in a USB/HDMI stick for excellent prices.
But if you want a hobbyist device with USB, GPIO & ethernet that you can build a project around, the Pi is a great device to play with. Pre-built phones may be more capable, but they're also less flexible in many ways.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A flavor of Android 2.3 is better then Debian???
A lot of people are buying the Pi to run XBMC. Since it can support 1080p flawlessly and the Via APC cannot, well... for many people the choice is obvious.
With any luck, the (relatively) open nature of the Pi and increasing size of the community will make it a more interesting option than competing boards, which is the reason why the Arduinos are still very popular despite being outclassed hardware-wise by other boards.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Not fair to even include battery life in the equation as the PI has no battery, so it has 0 battery life. Better to count the Android devices battery as a built in UPS.
Given the near-omnipresence of time services (via cell tower signals, GPS, or pool.ntp.org), obtaining time as part of the system boot is trivial. The simple reason the Raspberry Pi has no RTC, is that the chip and battery would have doubled both the PCB size, and the price.
I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops.
(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I don't feel scammed... this is pretty typical early release delay - could have gone faster, almost never does.
No GIPO headers which is going to be an issue for some uses.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Except for the last point ( thus my statement about external usb ) you can get all the above. ...
Now space might be an issue for your 'media' since you are limited to flash cards, but you can always stream from a file server over wifi..
Actually, people have hacked together usb host mode drivers for the USB chips in the samsung galaxy s and galaxy s ii phones (and probably others), so there now exists the potential to plug in usb hubs, usb drives etc. into the smartphone, solving the space for media issue, and also the gpio port issue, if you buy a usb to gpio interface adapter.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The uptime on mine is over a week and it's still showing the correct time. Actually, an especially correct time - I haven't got round to changing it from BST to PDT.
(My internal body-clock still runs on British Time, unfortunately.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
There's nothing to hack; the Galaxy SII has USB host mode out of the box.
" The simple reason the Raspberry Pi has no RTC, is that the chip and battery would have doubled both the PCB size, and the price"
Doubled the PCB size? really?
A CR2032 lithium coin battery, a tiny 8 pin IC and a 32KHz watch crystal is hardly the size of a credit card.
And the price? In quantity, a couple of dollars for the lot.
1080p output on $99, 4" cell phones is only a few years away. If not new, then through the used/craigslist channels. It's too bad the OLPC project didn't invest more heavily in cell phones.
This 4th of july I'll be launching an old blackberry curve a couple hundred feet in the air using fireworks simply because it's worth more to me as a disposable video camera than anything else. In 2008 that phone cost $250 with contract.
Honestly these near-daily advertisements for sub-cellphone hardware on slashdot are getting tiring.
moox. for a new generation.
"A lot of people are buying the Pi to run XBMC. Since it can support 1080p flawlessly and the Via APC cannot, well... for many people the choice is obvious."
That's true and for that specific use, it may be fine. But from the reviews I have seen so far, just about any video processing other than playback is out of the question.
most people don't know how to count. What do you expect?
You're in luck - the Debian image is currently the recommended one on the downloads page.
(I've no idea what the 'official' educational version will be running, but from the distributions I've played round with so far, Debian is probably the most complete. Although I have switched to the go-faster-stripes Raspbian, which is very similar from a usage point of view.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
it does in some situations, I currently have a few + many AVR boards that I have made up for different tasks, but in this situation I need to monitor AND interact with many PLC controllers, beefy cpu, linux + touchscreen is ideal and I already found it for 110 bucks at minibox.com
A vanilla version compiled for ARMv6 will run, yes. Those are, of course, pre-prepped images ready to dump straight to an SD card and boot. There is nothing terribly fancy going on here as Fedora and Ubuntu run on the device readily, once you toss in the firmware blob for the GPU and the driver packages (just like any other distro.)
At which point you get everything available to any common Linux platform.
Whereas with Android you get a platform that shares nothing but a kernel with the rest of the world, using a custom graphics API, custom libc, wonky filesystem, and a heavy dependency on Java. Let alone the lack of a package manager and repository to back it with.
I see what you are saying. Learning computers? Ok, let's look at RasPi:
RasPi: $25. Monitor: About 100. Mouse/keyboard: 20 or so. Power supply: 5. Speakers: 5. SD card: we'll say about 20. So we're talking about $175, total for a 700 Mhz machine. I'll bet you could do as well on Craigslist looking for used laptops.
I think the "thing" with RasPi is its hackability. Sure, you could learn to program on any capable machine. But this thing has...other applications. It's small. Embedded small. And very capable. And has lots of exposed I/O which a laptop wouldn't have. This is a device to inspire future geeks, not teach the masses how to program. I think that's the idea.
Honestly the first things I thought when I heard of this project were all pretty black-hat, I must admit. A nifty little proxy you could hide in a wall at a college dorm or computer lab. Or little dinky tor nodes hidden around third world countries. Or stick it in an Altoids tin with a battery near a public wifi spot and have it bittorrent things for you. Or a dinky little sniffer you could leave somewhere strategic running Aircrack or Wireshark and pick up later. Not that I'd do any of these things, or would advocate such, of course, oh heavens no. But you have to admit...a fully capable computer of this size and price - there are a lot of naughty things you could do with it. With nearly zero consequences. Twenty five bucks isn't a lot to gamble.
I think that's the gist, honestly. It's like an arduino on steroids. A little tiny Rorschach test. When you look at it what do you see? What can you make it into?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I think many people here are forgetting a few important things about the Pi...
- Linux vs Android : I've had a few Android devices now - none of which have the functionality and ease of use compared to a Linux device, all the way from a Linux Modem or VoIP system to the back end of an ESXi cluster (or vSphere or whatever they call it these days), for someone with a decent understanding of Linux/Unix varieties the Raspberry Pi is the obvious solution. Entire companies have ran on server's that have less grunt than a Pi and now its all been reduced down to the size if a phone... AND
- Power Consumption (and price) : 3 watts at peak usage.... 3 watts!!! Does this mean that I can just use 4 x AA rechargable batteries and a 30cm (12") x 30cm Solar panel and run it forever (or until the batteries need replacing)? Maybe put a small panel on the parcel shelf in your car so your CarPC is always running and ready to go? How about something more critical like medical equipment which can have sensors plugged into the GPIO and use solar/wind/batteries to monitor patients in poor areas? No other commercially available system in the past has had this much CPU Power/Ram with such little energy consumption and price, citizens of 3rd world countries might have a chance to "own" a computer and, even better - its open source - which will boost Linux usage worldwide and take a market share from the big players like Apple and Microsoft.
- Size : And weight. It wont be too long until we see computers like this embedded into clothing and other parts of every day life, and the Pi is just the start of that, as tech gets smaller and cheaper, we'll be able to product it in abundance - data for example - we went from trading Floppy Disks, to Harder Small Floppy Discs, to CD's, and hard drives, to DVD's and now its time for solid state joy, what next? Trading complete plug in system.....
- Autoplay? Screw that... for $50-$100 my cost, I can now give a customer a box and all they need to do is plug in HDMI and turn it on, it will give a full length video presentation on any screen or TV with HDMI in, with a keyboard and mouse you can give them a fully interactive product to play with, and with a wifi adapter and internet access you could use the box as a tech support node in their office, add a camera you have a portable video conferencing screen.
- Hmm I might want Autoplay (Annoying Customers) : You know, the type that harass you on how to play their mp4 rip of Game of Thrones, generally family members and friends that charging a decent rate to help would make you look like an ass so you do it for free to be nice? They will be a thing of the past, you can give them a box that plugs into their TV - which they plug *THEIR* USB stick into, and it will play almost any format with an easy to use menu. I'm no economist but I predict the savings and health costs purely because of this will be in the billions.
People need to stop being so obsessed with having the fastest and greatest and look at what they can do now. I paid almost $2000 for a Dual Celery 466 with 256 meg ram, 18 gig 7200 rpm HDD and a Voodoo 3, now days a $50 card would eat it alive and use 1/200th of the energy. In a time when the world is having an energy crisis this kind of thing is kind of important. I run my laptop, stereo and lighting in my smoking/drinking room on 12v batteries (also preparing for zombies), and once we get decent USB LED projectors, the Pi is going to be the main part of it all.
fuck I feel old now /rant...
I'm not signing anything
The difference is that the raspberry pi is/will be immensely popular. There will be a huge community supplying software solutions and hardware modifications for it. It doesn't matter that some random china-device has twice the power and a touchscreen when you're stuck on Android 2.1, closed kernel, and no updates in sight.
It's the people that matter, not so much the hardware.
I've been playing with my Raspberry Pi today (just twiddling with 'ncurses' under C). I see it being excellent for learning it is perfect as the standard reference platform for a lot of CS courses from "Introduction to Programming" up - but maybe a bit out of it's depth at OS the design level.
For around the same cost as a text book everybody it ensures that everybody will have the same hardware, the same OS with all the same toolsets. This will avoid the "Jimmy owns a Mac, and I have 32 bit XP, and Bob has an Android tablet" problem. As a bonus it also has zero product licensing issues...
Sure, you wouldn't want to compile a big project on it, but for anything you would do in school it would be fine.
In the 80s (or was it the 70s) there was a craze to get people cooking with chinese woks. Basically, they were just frying pans and were promoted for making stir-fry food (other uses are available: satellite dish, giant saucer).
Because of the publicity and cheap prices they were popular for a time. Lots of people bought one - or were given one. There were books published on the back of that popularity. However, after a brief trial most woks ended up in the graveyard of kitchen gadgets; the cupboard under the sink.
The Pi is going through the same phase. It's received massive (in the geek world, at least) publicity - enhanced by its scarcity: an accidental piece of marketing genius, given that many better alternatives exist. The "buzz" around it is truly amazing and lots of people either have bought one or are waiting to order one. However, I haven't actually seen anything that anyone has made using a Pi.
Mine arrived a few days ago and it's like going back to the 1990's so far as having to futz around to get it to do anything useful. The Linux implementations for it are poorly documented, incomplete and lack features. I'm sure that most people, once they get past the novelty of connecting a naked circuit-board to their TVs and realising it's too slow to play videos, too limited to surf the internet and too lacking for games, flash and anything else except terminal-level programming that it, too will end up in the cupboard under the sink, next to the wok.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Learning should not be done on a minimalistic system. It simply isn't worth it. Get an old PC for that. You don't want your learning to be constrained by irrelevant factors such as lack of RAM or poor performance or insufficient disk space or unavailable libraries. Get a PC, load a development system and install every development package under the Sun. Your task would be to learn how to code in $foo, not to discover problems with interpreter of $foo on architecture $bar. It is not always easy even for experienced coders to port an already working software from the development system into the embedded target.
I think you're missing the point somewhat. The PC is a heterogenous environment, so you will always have to deal with funny little quirks of compatibility in libraries etc. It's only when you get a homogenous, uniform environment that you stop having to work your way around machine-specific problems.
No, not everything is available on the Raspberry Pi... yet. Yes, someone has to port it. But that's the job of the early adopters, and it only needs done once, and then it is available to everybody.
By the time the first in-a-case Pi comes out, there will no doubt be a hell of a lot of stuff available for it.
The secondary effect will be that there will be better software coverage for all variants of ARM Linux, and Linux users will be able to start migrating away from the Linux i386 and x64 architectures. I've been waiting a long time for desktop Linux to cease to be a PC OS, as it limits its appeal. A desktop ARM Linux would be in direct competition with dumb terminals in the enterprise, and would offer the added bonus of being able to do mixed-mode local and network computing -- maybe they'd still want to use Microsoft Office remotely rather than LibreOffice locally, but they could use Firefox locally without bother.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Okay so you are bragging about stealing somebody else's much sought after early delivery, maybe a child's since it is an educational product, and proud about how much you scalped them for it?
I don't get the world anymore. The Raspberry Pi is way more powerful than the Apple ][ I got when I was 13 and that changed my life!
So fuck you!
Well I have been holding off on a project at work waiting on this thing, and now that its finally "available" I cant get it, I have a red line pressed against me and while I and the bosses are extremely patient, at some point you just got to move on
That time for me was April 24th 2012 at 3PM when I got asked "when are you going to do something about the environmental chamber controls?" 1 order from minibox and a few days later we all scratched it off our list.
PI - 1
So... let's get this straight... A device is released to the public at low margins by a non-profit for the purposes of education, and you're complaining that you couldn't get ahold of one for a commercial project? I think your definition of "people ... who have actual real uses for the damn things" is a bit skewed. There were already perfectly appropriate products for your needs on the market.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I don't think it's an unfair assessment to say that many or even most of the R-Pis sold so far are going to wind up in the bottom of a crap drawer. Not soon, because anyone who gets bored with them soon can put them on eBay and recoup their cost or even make money, but eventually...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This 4th of july I'll be launching an old blackberry curve a couple hundred feet in the air using fireworks simply because it's worth more to me as a disposable video camera than anything else. In 2008 that phone cost $250 with contract.
And then you got another $250 phone with contract, and then another $250 phone with another contract. That's the real reason your BB curve isn't worth much to you. Not because it's not a useful device, but because you were conned into buying a new phone you didn't actually need every time you got a contract.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The FAQ states that audio over HDMI is supported. ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs about halfway down.)