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Eben Upton Muses on the Raspberry Pi, Scratch and, His Love For Parallela
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."
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).
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
In the back of your mind, you havenâ(TM)t got Raspberry Pi 2?
No, not Pi 2. It must obviously be named 2 Pi.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
When I first read about the Raspberry Pi I was excited because I thought they were going to recreate this boot to a BASIC interpreter-type of experience we used to have on Apple II's and TRS-80's and the like. That's the sort of experience that they claimed inspired the raspberry pi, and they claimed that sort of programming-based, learning-intensive experience was what they wanted the pi to be about.
So, I was very disappointed to see that by default, a raspberry pi really is "just a pc" that boots into your typical CLI, and the "getting started" instructions actually have the new user start up X right off the bat. Providing scratch and a python IDE are nice and all, but I feel like all the normal trappings of "just a pc" take focus away from the real point of the pi.
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.
Useless? Nope. It's not exactly a stellar performer, but it has a lot of uses. Remember, it's designed as an educational product, rather than as a PC replacement. It is not as powerful as your average desktop PC. But it is not useless.
My own Pi runs Samba4 (it's an Active Directory domain controller for my home Windows PC network, and runs a DNS service), it runs CUPS (for network printer sharing), it runs CrashPlan (for backing up my other PCs' data), and it runs the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack so that it can run some dynamic web-based services - the ones I use are Cacti and Observium (for graphing/monitoring my Cisco devices), and Horde Webmail/Groupware.
This is exactly what I used to use an old AMD Sempron box for. Granted, that AMD box was free, and more powerful - but it's bigger, noisier, makes more heat, and consumes more power than the Pi does.
I think the Pi is a fantastic project. It would be nice to see a more powerful ARM CPU and extra RAM on the next version of the board, but I'd be just as happy to see Ethernet being separated from the USB bus, and a SATA connector with the option to set your Pi up to boot from a hard drive out of the box (note that mine does run off a USB hard drive, but it still has to use the MicroSD card as a bootstrap - a SATA controller could also mean faster I/O throughput).
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
However it's really good at doing things that use the GPU, it's a lot more stable and faster than the alternatives at that price point. A single core 700MHz CPU with 256/512MB RAM and 128MB of VRAM was all we had a couple of years ago and we did really well with it. Sure you won't drive the most modern accelerated GUIs with it but a static, usable GUI works pretty well.
Disclaimer: I have developed a professional embedded advertisement system on the RPi with currently about 50 Pi's deployed.
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So please show me the GPIO Interface of your "Android Stick".
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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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