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Raspberry Pi's $25 Model A Hits Production Line

Posted by timothy on from the house-automation-brain-perhaps dept.

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.'"

1 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Cool but SLOOOOOOW by TheRealQuestor · · Score: 5, Informative
    I got my model b last week and it's been pretty fun so far. But one thing that kinda sucks about it is its speed. Even overclocked to 1Ghz it's pretty painful to do anything on. Not to mention it wasn't 35 dollars to get it up and running. I wrote this a few days ago for another site but it is pretty relevant here too.

    .

    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.