Slashdot Mirror
Raspberry Pi, Smart Highways Win World's Biggest Design Prize
An anonymous reader writes "Last night the €500,000 INDEX: Award was awarded to five designs that can improve life for millions of people around the world. The winners include high-tech highways that light up at night, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer, a simple piece of paper that can cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks, and a plan for adapting to climate change."
Cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce or... drive up the demand for cooled storage devices?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
> [FreshPaper extends] the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks
"Well, kids. I'm back with our month supply of Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and celery. Where's the FreshPaper? I can't find it."
(Kids get an evil look on their faces and stare away.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Will the "FreshPaper" cost the same as replacing spoiled produce or less? If not then I only see this being a niche product for those who are already trying to be more environmentally conscious. The only reference to price in the article is the use of the phrase "low-cost", which is ambiguous at best.
Ummm maybe because only techie hipsters have heard of any of those? Raspberry Pi is a viable platform that people can easily get a hold of, has a growing community (developers, tutorials, etc), and is affordable.
And yet, you didn't provide names of any that match the Pi's price.
i bet some dullard will reply to this quoting the $25/$35 price tag of the pi, claiming that the price is the most important and striking attribute of it. and for that schmuck i'd like to point out that there are other arm socs priced just the same (or a measly dollar higher) that are still so much more than the overhyped pi.
I think you have explained it right there. No matter how good or bad your product is, it is nothing without hype. All people care about today is hype.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Great, more light pollution for astronomers.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
from TFA:
If the road could talk to you, what would it say?
i'm guessing it would be something like, "OWW! OWW! GET OFF ME! IT HURTS!"
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Don't get baited by this troll.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
won't that make the road slicker, like logos on basketball courts? for the entire length of a high-speed highway, that's dangerous.
The veggie paper doesn't have any test data. The lighted up highways is just speculating. Nothing real, nothing proven. These are winners? I'd hate to see the losers
Strangely enough, so is Capitalism.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
From the above list:
ODROID - $90
CubieBoard - $90
MK908 - $65
RPi - $30
How dare people vote with their dollars.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
The Pi is an ARMv6 with a FPU attached, and a decent GPU. Most of the new ARM SBCs out there now are ARMv7 which should be more efficient. Often they have NEON support to help with hardware decoding media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_SIMD_.28NEON.29.
Also Debian and Ubuntu only have official builds for ARMv7. The Debian team rebuilds ARMv6 as a seperate distro (Raspbian) for the Pi.
Many of the other boards are well within $10 of the price of a Pi, but include eMMC flash on the board so no SD card is required to boot the OS making the TCO about the same or cheaper if you are buying fast SD cards to boot quickly on the Pi.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3310907/what-are-the-advantages-of-armv7-over-armv6-when-compiling-iphone-apps
Consumer Reports covered Fresh Paper a few months back, and from their testing, determined an air-tight container performed better.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/06/claim-check-fenugreen-freshpaper/index.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDR20j0aTUY
Bah, it's a road, so if you anthropomorphize it, it's saying "oooh, yeah, a little to the left".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...imperialism, the highest and last stage of capitalism, is in irreversable decay.
It's so rotten, one might rightly say imperialism is already with one foot into the grave.
The silver lining: communism is one step ahead of imperialism.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
A couple of points to bear in mind:
- You can now buy a Model B Pi bundled with a fast 8GB SD card for $40 from both our primary distributors.
- Most other cheap boards use the Cortex A8 core, which is rather a primitive implementation of the ARMv7 ISA. In particular, while it's great at memcpy() and reasonable at integer operations, it has rather poor floating point performance; for a floating-point performance comparison of ARM11+VFP, Cortex A8 and the (more modern and capable) Cortex A9, see:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/466?page=7
In other news, the FreshPaper guys are amazing. Definitely the stars of the show here in Copenhagen.
FTFA
I think it has as much, or more, to do with the culture surrounding the Raspberry Pi foundation as it does with the price point.
This is good work these people are doing and it is about making a difference (hence the whole point of the award).
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Why not just put the images in the street lamps and use a simple motor to select the image appropriate for the conditions?
Work Safe Porn
Greater probability of mechanical failure, whereas Glow in the dark temperature reactive paint may just need a very rare periodic repaint, just as the normal road paints require that are in use today.
Should be enough to build like 10 meters of that super intelligent highway!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
The Broadcom BCM283 system on a chip is impressive, cramming all that capability into one cheap part. So is the Allwinner, which is similar, costs $7, and is the basis of tablets that cost $40. The Raspberry Pi is just a breakout board with a crappy connector layout. There are lots of other ARM boards, most with better layouts.
i bet some dullard will reply to this quoting the $25/$35 price tag of the pi, claiming that the price is the most important and striking attribute of it. and for that schmuck i'd like to point out that there are other arm socs priced just the same (or a measly dollar higher) that are still so much more than the overhyped pi.
Are there any with a warranty of more than four weeks that you can actually mention by name?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Pi's CPU is a dog, mostly because there's only one of them. But the GPU seems fairly credible and XBMC actually runs properly on it. That's a lot of people's use case in particular, so IMO that's the killer app for people not using the GPIO. libsf is still sketchy on Mali...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Images? Motor? um, simple transparent lcd would be more efficient.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Have you looked at a road lately? Even though the markings are mostly not in the vehicles' tire tracks, they paint becomes worn very quickly indeed. We put up with it for paint because it's a radically different color to the background, so even heavily-faded paint is easy to see. Paint emitting a relatively dim glow is not going to be so easy to see, and it is going to need much more frequent repainting. Not to mention that the markings will have to cover a much larger proportion of the road to have any real utility, making the volume of paint required significantly higher.
We already have enough difficulty and expense maintaining the world's roads. Making them even more expensive and difficult to maintain is an idiotic idea, done largely in the name of being pseudo-futuristic. For the most part, you don't pay direct attention to the road surface when driving anyway, except when slowing for junctions. You focus most of your attention further down the road, or at least you are driving properly and anticipating problems. The correct answer isn't nonsensical painted snowflakes shimmering on the road. It is easily-maintained, automated road signs that would very quickly pay for themselves in a reduced failure rate and far-less-frequent maintenance.
You know, the same thing as the messaging gantries we have over many large roads now, although a far smaller scale is needed on most roads.
But that's not sexy and futuristic, so it doesn't win awards. Idiotic rubbish like this does.
I think it has as much, or more, to do with the culture surrounding the Raspberry Pi foundation as it does with the price point.
Perhaps when the Raspberry Pi Foundation has an Education Strategy I'll be more supportive of such awards. Until then, talk of helping youngsters learn to program is twaddle.
The new school term is about to start and still no 'Education Packs' available, or even planned. They're happy enough to sit back and take the dollars from people running HTPCs instead.
Let's see what the last update was. April 2012:
The Foundation is currently scrambling to gets its education pack ready by the time units are ready for the classroom.
Uh-huh.
Eben, why were you terminated as a director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation?
http://opencorporates.com/filings/180901240
I resigned as a Foundation trustee in December, though I continue to run the Foundation on a day-to-day basis. I am also managing director of the Foundation's wholly-owned trading subsidiary, Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd, which handles the engineering work associated with the Pi.
Thanks for replying, but you didn't answer my question. I want to know why you are no longer a Raspberry Pi Foundation trustee. Why did you resign?
Replying on the (probably optimistic) assumption that you're actually interested.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a somewhat unusual charity, in that it derives the bulk of its funding from trading activities rather than through "shake the tin" fundraising. In this respect we resemble charities which run high-street retail businesses to supplement their charitable income. Once you reach a certain size, it is considered good practice to separate trading activities into another, generally wholly-owned, business entity, and to have substantially non-overlapping board membership between the charity and the trading entity. I resigned in order to reduce the overlap to a single person, Jack Lang, who chairs the boards of both entities; we subsequently added Louis Glass to the Foundation board, restoring it to the original complement of six people.
More detail in our public filings at Companies House (http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/).
If I wasn't interested I wouldn't have asked the question. I'm definitely not the only person who is curious about this situation.