Raspberry Pi Model A Makes First Appearance

An anonymous reader writes "It's easy to forget that the Raspberry Pi currently shipping is the more expensive model of the board. It is actually called the Model B as it sports more features than the $25 Model A. The main differences [compared to the B model] include a lack of an Ethernet port and the associated networking chip, as well as the presence of only one USB port instead of two. There was originally going to be less memory on the Model A (128MB instead of 256MB), but the Raspberry Pi Foundation managed to make enough cost savings during a redesign to increase the amount to 256MB on the cheaper version. With all the focus being on the Model B, we haven't actually seen the (near) final Model A board yet. But that changes today, as Eben Upton has just shown off the $25 board."

Comments

Re:POS

[MadCow42]

I'm using the RPi to drive a prototype device that I'm building. Currently it's just driving two real-time stepper motors (or close to real time), and doing a great job of it. For our production device though, we don't need Ethernet, and only want/need one USB - so the $10 savings and lower power consumption is perfect.

As for why we'd use an off-the-shelf board? Why not - it does everything we need, runs an off-the-shelf operating system, and is easy to program/update/use.

Why re-invent the wheel when we have areas where we can get a lot more value out of our time. As you seem to support - it's a great board!

MadCow.