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Raspberry Pi's $25 Model A Hits Production Line
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the cheaper variant of the Raspberry Pi — the Model A — has entered production phase. Model A of the credit-card sized computer has been stripped of its Ethernet port and a USB port, leaving just one USB port. This model comes with 256MB RAM, but as it is less complex compared to its predecessor it will consume less power, thus opening up quite a few new usage scenarios. The Foundation has posted the first image of the $25 Model A on its site and noted 'We're anticipating that those of you who buy the Model A will be using it for different applications from Model B owners.'"
I thought the model A and B came out at the same time? Did the B come out first for the enthusiasts to fund the reduced model. (I know the stated goal of the A is for education) whereas the goal for the B would presumably be for hackers. That being said I am actually borrowing a friends RPi to see about it's use as a serial console and I am not disappointed.
I'm wondering if the model A will really have much of a market.
The end of the market that the A might have been useful in may well have been overtaken by the top-end of the M-series ARM processors, especially with companies like STM now pitching boards like the Discovery STM32F4 for $20 or so.
Yes, it's got less RAM, less MIPS and so forth -- but it *is* 100% open and incredibly capable for what it is.
How a $35 computer cost me $90 bucks..
So a long time ago I signed up to order one of these cool little Raspberry PI $35 dollar card sized computers. After a month or 2 I finally was able to order it. After a .
week or two I finally was able to hold it. After a day or two I finally was able to actually use it..
I’ll explain. It’s JUST the little pc, nothing else.
SO I had to buy the following:
1x 1k 5v USB wall wart. $20 bucks.
1x 16 Gig Class 10 SD Card $20 bucks.
1x Micro USB to USB Cable $10 bucks.
Factor in the cost of the PC with shipping $43.79 + $20 + $20 + $10 and now that $35 dollar computer is actually almost $94 bucks..
That said, it’s actually kinda cool. Not as powerful as one might like but cool none the less..
As a test I set it up running the debian installer [this took about 6 hours], setup to compile XBMC [this took about 2.5 hours] and went about compiling it..
On my main rig the compile takes all of about 8 minutes [after a make clean], on the RPI it took over 12 hours. 12 HOURS to do what my main rig can do in 8 minutes!.
Now I understand it's "only" a 35 dollar PC so one cannot expect a whole lot out of it, but in reality it's NOT a 35 dollar pc. It's a 90 dollar phone guts without the phone parts.
Anyone know of linux software that can do what this hardware/embedded software/firmware can do to control humidity/temperature? It needs to turn electrical outlets on/off like in the linux journal article (relays), to control temp and humidity. The idea of the project is to control a room's temp by controlling two fans placed inside flexible ducting run from the room to two outer room locations, one to a cold room, one to a hot room, so that if the monitored room needs heat, it exhausts from a duct tube with a fan in the end of it, the air near the floor to the cold room, and pulls hot air from the hot room to the monitored room with the duct exhausting near the ceiling of the monitored room. And if the room is too hot, the fan in the "ceiling" duct reverses or a second fan/duct near the ceiling pushes hot air from the monitored room to the hot room, and pulls cold air from the cold room and delivers it to the monitored room. The humidity control would also work to pull/push air from rooms with varying humidity (or from outside) to the monitored room as needed when temperature control is secondary.
Can this be done without using embedded or real-time kernel software, just a regular script or simple written program running in a linux distro with a html or other interface to enter temp or humidity limits? Without being an expert in snmp or embedded languages?
The raspberry pi would be perfect for this and far cheaper than the board in the article (which I already own and is sitting in its original box because of the complexity of the software/code). That is if the raspberry pi can control relays.
Suspended page? LOL does that mean the Parity News blogspam might be coming to an end?
Granted it's cheap, but anyone considering this should really just get an iPad.
The Model A might have a USB port, but it totally lacks apps and does not have a Retina Display. The onboard storage is so limited, why even bother? And without WiFi, it's nearly useless. Not to mention the base of accessories the iPad already enjoys.
Seriously, a $35 Raspberry Pi and an $899 Surface Pro... all anyone needs is an iPad.
#OnSlashdotEverythingIsInferiorToIPad
-David
I love my Pi, it's nice and small
And on that little circuit board is all
You need to learn to code as fun
For fun and joy are needed
To get the learning process done.
John_Chalisque
It's friday night. Go out, get shitfaced, and blow your load into some fat girl pussy. You'll thank me later.
Tinkering and coming up with cool (if impractical) uses... and quite frankly, that's what computing has lost over the years... Doing strange crap with the user port of your C-64 was damn fun, IMNSHO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5npkz0xY1fo
Thanks to the Pi for bringing that tinkering fun back....
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
The USB doesn't even work properly on the full fledged model
They fixed it in the latest release... I have tried it with the new ISO... works great. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I'm using my model A for frosty pissing.
Go ahead.. plug it into a 220 V outlet first tho.
It seems designed for the electronics hobbyist, given that it comes with no case, no wall-wart, and no cable. Electronics hobbyists have that stuff in a box somewhere, so paying for it again would just kind of waste their money.
However, from the point of view of an electronics hobbyist, I just look at the web site and think "where the fuck is the datasheet?" I don't order $1 parts, let alone $25 parts, without first looking into what kind of bullshit is involved in using it.
I see it has some GPIO pins, but there's no mention of their capabilities (analog/digital, are they all I/O capable or only some input and some output, etc.) and so I'm left to guess that I could probably do something with it. I guess.
However, I can also look at the datasheet for an AT89S52 and see exactly what's involved in using it, and at $1.75 a piece, I can order a dozen of them for $25 so if I break a few it's no big deal. ...and I did, and they're quite useful little things. At $1 a piece (they were cheaper when I bought them) you can toss one into any project. I used one along with an FT245RL to build a USB programmer for the chips (which I programmed via my parallel port since I didn't have a programmer yet). Since then I've generally be using them to interface with my computer, by connecting them to FT245RL and programming them to read from SPI ADC chips or some other digital chips. They're actually quite ideal for filling the gap between a PC and the electronics world. PCs lack I/O ports, and generally aren't very good at real time tasks. The little CPU in the AT89S52 can do real-time tasks then send the data off to the PC via the FT245RL which has a 64-byte buffer. I once used it to build an eight channel EEG, with it simply doing the timing so that the samples were read at the correct rate, and driving the SPI bus of the ADC chips. ...and that in-circuit programmability is wonderful since, if my code doesn't work, I just type new code and run the command to program it -- I don't even have to touch the electronics.
However, as for the Raspberry Pi, I don't know what I'd do with it. Presently I'm using one of the AT89S52 to gather wet/dry bulb measurements to monitor humidity levels. The data is sent to my computer, where ploticus turns it into a graph that an HTML page in my web browser constantly refreshes. I suppose I could try to do that, but the Raspberry Pi has no RTC, and thus can't properly collect the data without another computer involved. So either way I have to use my PC, and the Pi costs $35 (if I want that network port so I can get the time) or $25 and some clever hack to let it communicate with my computer to send the data there since it has no way to time stamp it. ...or I can use my AT89S52 + FT245RL solution for about $6. (Hey, if the Pi can ignore the costs of cables, power supplies, and SD cards, I can ignore the cost of a USB socket, cable, power supply, and a home-made circuit board. ...or actually, I don't even need the power supply because those two chips aren't going to draw 100 mA, so it can be USB powered.)
I do see people on the internet amused by using an Arduino to make an LED flash. Perhaps the Pi is marketed towards those types.
The first Pi had chipsets that were known for years to be full of bugs and problematic. Then they went with proprietary blobs that free distros couldn't distribute and weren't open source.
Is this more of the same? When will we get a Pi that isn't buggy as hell? Eat your vegetables before you have dessert, guys.
Please help metamoderate.
and you might get it by summer.!
From the blog:
we’ve not been able to build them, because to do so would mean that we have to cannibalise Model B parts – and that would mean that people who are experiencing the backlog would have to wait even longer
Of course, you would not want to let people wait a few weeks for a Model B. People who have been waiting for months for a Model A on the other hand... I said it before elsewhere, and I repeat it here: just raise the price of Model A to bring its profit margin on par with Model B, and let the market decide what it wants! The reasoning that $25 was crucial to reach education is not even used to justify Model A anymore. Now it's for robotics, automation and media centers.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Sorry.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
it completely fails as a general purpose computer
And a screw driver completely fails as a hammer.
It is specifically sold as a development board, the only people that claim it is a general purpose computer such as yourself have literally made that up and pulled it from their ass.
When you buy an item that is named "refrigerator magnet", then yes it will make a poor car and a poor airplane and a poor life boat. Fucking Duh!
Everything about the machine is great, but the choice of a micro B USB jack for power sucks too much to ignore. It's like the coolest car you've ever owned in your life, but there's a big spike sticking up right in the middle of the driver's seat.
The current model draws about 0.5 Amps on standby giving it limited appeal for remote logging/light battery applications.
Personally I think the bigger issue is lack of basic protection of the GPIO pins (you can easily destroy a PI by shorting out the pins). The lack of some basic peripherals (i.e a real time clock and some ADC channels) is also a bit frustrating - although I've managed to get some ADCs working well over the SPI.
I would trade the composite video socket and maybe a few dollars for the unit to ship with ADCs and protection on the GPIO pins as I think these are the biggest factors that might stump people early on when trying to get the thing to interact with the real world.
Having said all that, I'm very much enjoying the PI, (I'm currently using it to control a simple test rig for my PHD)... I remote desktop to it from my flat!... losing the ethernet port would be a big no-no for me.
That's hard to do without the ethernet port, but it's been done with the model B.
Monster Cable can make it even more expensive than that, but you're making it hard for them if you're not buying a $15 Ethernet cable for your Pi as well. All the kit you describe can be had, including an Ethernet Cable for less than $20, if you're happy to take just a 4G or 2G SD card. That will be plenty if you are networking it up or using local storage via USB.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
They fixed it in the latest release... I have tried it with the new ISO... works great. :)
No they didn't. Isochronous transfers are still broken.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Lots of people keep saying that but it ain't so. It was specifically created as a play/learning tool. That's not a denigration; it's a simple fact. I think it serves well in its intended role.
Development boards are Olimex, BeagleBone, et al.
You make a good point and I have no issue with it except for that minor quibble.
You mad?
Forget all this MMU nonsense, what this thing need is MMX!
lucm, indeed.
So the Model B was used by people to enable them to say they owned a Raspberry Pi.
What will the Model A be used for?