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Entries Open For First Ever 24-Hour Raspberry Pi Hackathon
concertina226 writes "Called the Raspberry Pi 'hack day', the competition will pit 100 entrants against one another in a number of categories using only the board, Internet access, soldering irons and as much coding as they think appropriate. Participants will have 24-hours to complete projects, at the end of which winners will be awarded from a variety of prizes including camcorders, Android tablets and the geek must-have, the Hubsan H107 Quadcopter."
How are you going to prevent someone from creating 1,000,000 lines of code and putting it on a web site to download during the competition?
Learn to love Alaska
Is TechWorld for real or is it someone's blog?
"The best overall winner will also be given a tour of Sony’s Welsh in which the Raspberry Pi is manufactured"
Proof-reader sick today?
Actually, I'm not usually so grumpy but that full-page interstitial ad I had to dismiss before I got to the 7-paragraph ultra-lightweight "story" kind of ticked me off.
You might to solder up something like http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/04/12-things-to-make-raspberry-pi
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I can't speak for myself but it's the jerking around that I don't appreciate. This will be done this time, no wait, it'll be done that time. We have Android for you, oh but we're not going to release it and we won't explain why. Guess what? People who ordered two days later than you got twice as much RAM, which we clearly knew about for quite some time because these things don't happen overnight, but rather than discount the obsolete part we'll just ignore the whole situation. So much for Openness of the process, there is none. Also, claiming the entire driver stack is free from end to end when it isn't. (I have previously posted about being glad they opened up the driver stubs but that still doesn't make it the complete driver source. And no I'm not interested in hearing about how nobody else opens their blob either, because this is about the claim to a fully-open driver.) And let us not even get into the drastically incompetent shipping nightmares. What I learned from this is to avoid both RS and Farnell like the plagues they are because they are not competent to put something in a box and send it to a customer. Hell, Farnell will even defraud you about backstock and shipping, at least they did me.
We're a cynical bunch, and R-Pi has done nothing to change that. Indeed, it has only served to further cement the high value of cynicism. If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.
My next ARM computer will probably be a pogoplug. And hey, they have GPIO too :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not true - only one supplier has been that incompetent, and that one will wake up and ship if you cancel the order. There are plenty of alternative suppliers that promise 1-week delivery, and actually achieve faster than that. There's a factory in Wales producing 16,000 units a week, and the Foundation reckons they will have shipped 1 million units this year (the original target was 100,000).. As for what people are doing with it, you are rather behind, shipmate. Read the Foundation blog http://www.raspberrypi.org/ to catch up on what's going on.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
They arrive eventually - mine did yesterday. Some suppliers are just shit at getting it out on time (I'm looking at you, RS Components).
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Also, if you are waiting 2 months, perhaps you should order it from somewhere else. I ordered one and it arrived a week later. And that was only last month.
If you read reports it's clear that people in the same country ordering from the same vendor are getting their units on vastly differing time scales. And "from somewhere else"? there are 2 options, and both suck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As I've said in other threads on this subject: cancel your order with RS, go with Farnells. I just received my second, rev 2.0 board. My first (rev 1) Pi is running the home PBX quite happily using IncrediblePBX. The second one was ordered on 2012-11-06 and arrived on 2012-11-20.
Farnell seem perfectly competent to me,
I ordered mine from Farnell in August hoping it would arrive in time for the mid-winter hacking season and it arrived on my doorstep the very next day. This in Ireland, a place most Amazon and UK Ebay sellers won't ship to because of the random and untrackable variations in its postal system, no post codes and addresses such as "O'Leary's Farm, County Donegal."
IMHO the reason many Slashdotters are hostile to the Pi is that many Slashdotters are based in the US, a country that hasn't been high on the Pi's priority list. Keep in mind that while the Raspberry Pi is great for us grown-up hackers, it was intended primarily for school kids in the UK. So get to the back of the queue/line or build your own.
But it's not marketed as "open". Indeed, they go to pains to explain there are parts that will never be "open" in their FAQ. However, they do publish schematics and they do publish information and have a support forum for using the "bare metal", so it's more open than your typical PC. But it never has been marketed as "open", it's only ever been marketed as "affordable and easily programmable".
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Actually, they've sold something like a million Raspberry Pi's now, vastly more than they'd originally aimed for.
Look, if you paid for aboard with 256MB and were lucky enough to receive one with 512MB, that's a bonus. If you "only" got the exact thing you paid for, fully knowing what you were paying for, what the hell are you griping about? You're obviously not the target audience if you let something as trivial as this upset you. You're the kind of moaning, entitled whiner who brings projects down with constant nit-picking and negativity. Go away and start your own project; really, people like you are not really welcome anywhere. What do you really offer, besides criticism?
There's plenty you can do with the original board. For robotics, there's no need for any more RAM - it's only really useful for GUI / GPU use. I've yet to see a single project that requires 512MB, although it no doubt helps in some cases. It's a £20 board. That's nothing - not much more than the price of an Arduino UNO which is far less capable. I spend more than £20 for a lunchtime coffee and sandwich.