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Eben Upton Muses on the Raspberry Pi, Scratch and, His Love For Parallela

Posted by Unknown on from the boot-to-emacs-for-maximum-terror dept.

super_rancid writes "In a 7,000 word interview with Raspberry Pi's founder posted on TuxRadar.com, Eben Upton talks about the challenges of managing such a successful project, what may be in the Raspberry Pi mark 2, and why he wishes he'd backed the Parallela Kickstarter." On interesting answer: "We were thinking of booting into Python or booting into Scratch. For younger kids, boot into Scratch. Have an environment where it’s Linux underneath, boots into Scratch and hold down a key at a particular point during boot and it doesn’t boot into Scratch it just drops into the prompt. So you can play with Scratch for six months, once you’re happy with Scratch you turn over the page and 'Hold down F1 during boot,' and it’s like 'Oh look - it’s a PC!' So I think that’s something we’d really like to do."

5 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More RAM by CaptainOfSpray · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not enough room on the SoC, apparently. 512 MB is the max that will fit, without a complete redesign (which no-one wants to do, not enough value in it).

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  2. Re:I'd like to see his thoughts on... by Nevo · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think you misunderstand the purpose of the Pi. The Pi was developed to be an educational tool for high-school aged kids. The fact that hackers and makers found it useful and jumped on the bandwagon is a fortunate side effect, but wasn't a design goal of the Pi.

  3. Splitscreen python with turtle graphics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Something like this should boot in python, with split screen, half of the screen for turtle graphics (yes python includes turtle graphics in its standard library).
    Then we have something like the LOGO environment of old.
    While running a long piece of code it should full screen the turtle graphics, with using ESC to terminate the run and return back to split screen.

  4. Re:I'd like to see his thoughts on... by guruevi · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you underestimate how useless the Android sticks are and how underpowered it's GPU. The RPi GPU clocks at whatever the CPU clocks at (700MHz), the Mali GPU at 500MHz, the MK802 clocks not at 1GHz but is underclocked to somewhere around ~780MHz to keep it relatively stable. Mind you that you can also clock the RPi to 1GHz if you don't mind a relatively unstable board (800MHz is typically okay).

    I developed an embedded media platform on the Pi and I've tested some other designs as well, the Android stick while being $15-25 more expensive was slower doing ffmpeg tasks and had problems handling more than one video stream, at 100% CPU (ffmpeg conversion tasks) the Pi would chug along for hours while the Android would regularly reboot and heat up tremendously in the process, it also demands a lot more power (roughly double that of the Pi). The Pi overlays one video stream on the other without much of a hiccup. If the Android did any good it was detecting issues with my programs when they were unexpectedly interrupted.

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  5. Re:as always full of shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You listed an Android tablet and two Android sticks. I think you missed the part where he said "as good as Pi", since none of those fit that criteria.

    What you should have said was BeagleBone Black, $45:
    http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black