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First Steps With the Raspberry Pi

Posted by timothy on from the free-in-cracker-jacks dept.

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.

10 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Different markets by Namarrgon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"?
    1. Re:Different markets by Belial6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have been playing with Arduinos very recently. The places that the PI will fit in is where you need to plug into a standard monitor. A TV will be the most common for this. It will also be better than Arduino in places that need keyboard or mouse input. The Arduino seems like it will be better suited to to projects that need IO. Given that the PI runs a full Linux OS and clearly supports host mode for USB, it seems to me that hanging Arduino Nano's at $13 off of the PI's usb port will likely become a very popular solution. Use the PI as a UI system that handles the non-time critical heavy lifting while Arduino's slave out to autonomously run their particular tasks without the need for the PI to even be powered on.

    2. Re:Different markets by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you want Networking?
      http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9026 It is more expensive than a Pi.
      Wifi? Bluetooth? Well USB dongles can add that to the Pi.
      Want to do your development on the board without a PC? A Pi with a Keyboard and Monitor will do that.
      Want to play Audio? Here is a kit for you.
      http://www.adafruit.com/products/94
      Want to develop using Python, Ruby, Basic, Smalltalk, Lua, Perl, Lisp Scheme, Erlang, or Haskell? If it is an interpreted language then it may just be a compile away for the Pi.
      There are all sorts of options the pi opens up.
      The Arduino is great because of the broad support and community. It is early days with the Pi still but the idea of using Smalltalk for an embedded device interests me a lot.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    3. Re:Different markets by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Arduino Ethernet: my little HTTP server is utterly idiotic, waiting for a blank line followed by a newline then assuming a GET and spamming out data streamed in from the Micro-SD card. I even managed to run as far as a 64-byte buffer to speed up transmission to numerous kilobytes per second. 2KiB RAM, 32KiB flash program memory. (The microcontroller can't run code from the SD card without somehow reflashing itself.) The SD card library takes a big chunk of the RAM and flash. Interfacing a 3.3v serial JPEG camera (for taking a year-long timelapse, one shot a minute) was piss-easy, with the Arduino bit-banging serial on some of its GPIO. An analogue-to-digital converter allows a CdS cell as a light meter, also ridiculously easy to interface. Lives on a breadboard, held together with Blu-Tack.

      Raspberry Pi: I've got Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 (stop laughing) and PHP 5.4 (ditto) chuntering away quite happily. Installing APC seriously improved page load times - currently set to a 32 megabyte cache. 256MiB RAM, 8GiB flash. I even had it loading the test version of my blog-thing running on the Pi in Midori, a modern graphical browser running on the Pi. GPIO is much more fragile, and libraries and kernel support really isn't done yet.

      In other words, they're in very different worlds. They're very likely to complement each other, though...

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    4. Re:Different markets by Xenna · · Score: 5, Interesting

      But how much is an Arduino with ethernet and SD card storage? To name but a few features. (The answer is $13 + $40 + $25, that's $78 total, nowhere near $25 for a Pi model B)

      Can I run an Apache server on that Arduino? Can I program it in PHP/Python/Perl etc, etc. Because I can with the Pi. (I own both)

      An Arduino is a great device that can beat a Pi in many applications, but the same goes the other way around.

  3. Re:SoC datasheet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    there u go
    http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-43016/l/broadcom-datasheet-for-bcm2835-soc-used-in-raspberry-pi

  4. Re:A more important question... by SiggyTheViking · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A flavor of Android 2.3 is better then Debian???

  5. Re:A more important question... by humanrev · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    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.
  6. I like my RaspPi by hamster_nz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.