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Project Seeks To Build Inexpensive 9-inch Monitor For Raspberry Pi
angry tapir writes "A Kickstarter project is aiming to bring an inexpensive 9-inch portable monitor to the popular US$25 Raspberry Pi PC, which comes without a keyboard, mouse or monitor. The "HDMIPi" will include an LCD panel that will show images at a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Computers can be hooked up to the monitor via an HDMI controller board that can be wired to the LCD. The display is being made by Raspi.TV and Cyntech."
So they're going to build a ARM-based desktop computer. Sort of like a netbook in worse packaging. Why?
If you want a basic 9 inch ARM tablet, buy one. They're really cheap. You can get one on Amazon for about $72. Dump Android and load up Linux if you like.
Build? Just source the right part from any of the dozen Chinese manufacturers on Alibaba in the worst case.
Yes, 1280x800 is a horribly small resolution. But at least it's a good aspect ratio. 4:3 is bad for entertainment use - movies, games, and the like. 16:9 is similarly weak in productive use - even putting two windows side-by-side, it's not tall enough, and rotating it to portrait mode is often laughable. But, IMO, 16:10 is a good compromise - it works well for anything you do with it.
If it weren't for the fact that 2560x1600 monitors are absurdly overpriced compared to 2560x1440, I'd have gotten one of those for my primary monitor instead.
No, they're going to build an HDMI touchscreen with the Pi in mind. It's not a computer - it's just a screen.
Unfortunately - it isn't the Pi screen everyone wants. The thing people are screaming for is the one the Pi folks have promised us - the DSI screen.
"Lame" - Galaxar
for 129 euros i can buy a 21" 1080P display with HDMI.
You clearly don't understand the purpose of the Raspberry Pi. Nobody is replacing their computer with this, it's for making projects and experimenting and learning to program. A 9-inch monitor would use useful in many scenarios.
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
HDM-Pi sounds so much better than HDMI-Pi. How did they let that one slip through the cracks?
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
Oh goody! It's an original Macintosh all over again, except this time it's dirt cheap instead of horribly expensive.
How many GPIO pins does your ARM tablet have by the way? I sometimes wire wrap discrete components and sensors and stuff to the ones on my Raspberry Pi and write software to drive them.
The Raspberry Pi isn't just a cheap ARM-based PC. An important part of its vision is to bring back the spirit of hacking, both software and hardware, that used to be possible in the old computers of the 1980s. This has become very difficult to do on modern x86 PCs, and is all but impossible on mobile devices. The people who bash the Pi these days tend to forget that part for some reason.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Maybe someone is building a portable emulator. I don't know. I never had the need to physically connect mine to a display. I either ssh and if I really need to see an application I bring it up using remote X
I never got that "learning to program" excuse. Just install Python on whatever computer you're using right now. Why do you need a separate piece of hardware that doesn't even have a screen??
Define "spirit of hacking".
On x86/x64, I've got whole arsenal of programming tools on my fingertips, from simpler like Scratch and then all the way through simple, but rather powerful like Processing or LOVE up to (down to?) C, assemblers and HDLs. I can play around with pretty pictures and 2D physics, or write my own kernel, test it in a VM and boot it on my actual machine, I can also experience, for example, assembler for Motorola 68K in Amiga emulator or for Knuth's MMIX.
With Android, though you'll need a PC for most of development, you're still just one download away from writing your own programs, whether it's in Java, Lua, Javascript or ActionScript.
The only real difference from RasPi I see is it's too easy to get distracted by things already done on x86/Win or ARM/Android.
Real Programmers don't eat Quiche or use Python.
That does not even list a resolution. Also, its a tablet not a screen, and the screen area is lower do to the wider aspect ratio.
There are tons of hardware add-ons to the Pi that are simply not possible with a PC (and difficult with most tablets).
Unfortunately - it isn't the Pi screen everyone wants. The thing people are screaming for is the one the Pi folks have promised us - the DSI screen.
we dont even need DSI screen, just DSI driver
just like we need UNIVERSAL CSI driver, not that binary blob garbage locked to one module crap they ship with camera.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Yes but we've had microcontrollers for decades already.
Just as many as you plug-in to the USB port...
http://numato.com/8-channel-usb-gpio-module
You're right, it isn't that cheap, gets expensive fast, and even then makes a lousy PC.
Software hacking can be done on any system, and equipment with higher performance and open drivers are better platforms. The only reason the RPI brought back hardware hacking was because it was misdesigned, so everybody ends up swapping USB port resistors. Other than that... You can learn a lot more about hardware with a full-fledged PC, with swapable CPUs, memory, video, etc.
A few GPIO pins is ALL you can point to, and you can get BETTER I/O hardware, CHEAPER for a PC, or just buying a less expenive Arduino.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Can't really compare python to real programming. Python is for babies, real men program so close to hardware they can feel the pin states switching and sense the memory locations.
Might be, but what they have to do with spirit of hacking?
I say, just realizing that instead of clicking buttons you can automate your everyday tasks, may be even simply with shell scripts, is already in the spirit of hacking, as well as the next step of realizing you can extend them to do much more interesting things than simply replacing a human clicking on buttons.
Why do you need GPIO to feel that spirit?
This project would be nothing if not for the clever marketing of linking this to the Raspberry Pi. Otherwise, it's just an overpriced, under-spec'd and under-featured monitor. With the switch to HDTV, every cheap little TV out there has HDMI inputs, and can incidentally also work as a TV:
19" HDTV under $100:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Seiki-SE19HY10-19-720p-60Hz-LED-HDTV/28379383
7" HDMI touch, under $100:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=161137962772
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Your definition of hacking sounds like all software to me. I mentioned software and hardware. There isn't even a plain RS-232 serial or Centronics/IEEE-1284 parallel port on most modern PCs any more, which were the easiest ways to do hardware interfacing back in the day, and you'll be lucky to even have a host USB port on most mobile devices. USB can be used to do hardware interfacing, but it is in no way as trivial as serial or parallel port interfacing used to be. You could actually wire TTL-level logic straight to a parallel port, and you can wire the same stuff to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins with just a pull-down resistor (or you could use 3.3v CMOS logic instead).
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Cheaper? The price I see is $19.95 for that GPIO USB interface. For just $15 more I can have a Model B Raspberry Pi that already has several GPIO pins by default. The trouble with modern PCs is that they're complicated beasts, and it is extremely difficult to get down to the bare hardware without getting swamped in a morass of details that requires an inordinate amount of study just to get started, which basically kills it.
Only if you don't want a monitor with it.
Gee... what's the topic of this story and thread, again?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Even if there are no built-in RS-232 or parallel ports on the motherboard, there is plenty of interesting devices to plug into USB, including RS-232 adapters or, as mentioned in other comment here, GPIO modules.
So, with GPIO adapter at ~$15-20, it seems RasPi is for those who has no other computers in the house, but I still don't get what it has to do with spirit of the hacking by itself.
There are tons of hardware add-ons to the Pi that are simply not possible with a PC (and difficult with most tablets).
And what are some of these 'tons of hardware add-ons' that are not possible with a PC?
Power requirements, form factor, price, weight... an ARM tablet, PC etc... just can't do the job. Stop pretending otherwise.
Agreed. The other thing that people seem to choose to ignore is the value in a standadised platform and a helpful community around that. All the things the RPi does is possible by other means, of course, but what happens when you're starting out and don't know what you're doing? There's a big community around the RPi, magazines, tutorials, forums, all people who know what hardware you have and can answer your questions directly.
I'm a programmer by trade, but I know very little about analogue electronics. RPi community means I can get out into building physical things, which would be far harder if someone just threw a USB GPIO board at me with no extra help.
bring back the spirit of hacking, both software and hardware
And for that the Pi is a failure. It needs an O/S, which makes it difficult as an entry level and it can't even do analog inputs on its own.
The spirit of hacking was alive and as well as could be expected with the Aeduino, before the Pi came along - and it will be just as healthy after the Pi metamorphoses into an overpriced and underpowered LEGO-brick style tablet that doesn't work properly.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
How many GPIO pins does your ARM tablet have by the way?
Just plug something like this into your tablet.
A port expander is *not* the same thing as GPIOs - it means you incur the delays associated with doing things over USB/I2C/etc. Maybe that's ok if all you want to do is flash some LEDs or turn on a relay, but for timing constrained applications, that's not feasible.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Theirs is pronounced HD My Pi. Did you let that one slip through the cracks?
afaik nobody is using the gpio pins well enough to run steppers etc directly off it.
buying a tablet and arduino+usb-otg shield isn't too bad(clones! the official boards are horribly expensive). some official google sw for it too..
but the learn to program excuse is.. well it's an excuse. I've yet to learn anyone having bought and used one to learn to program, I know several who bought it to run their home automations etc - but they all knew how to program beforehand anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Think of yourself as a ten-year old kid who has a fascination with computers and stuff, the way I was thirty years ago when I got my first computer. How would you get into hardware hacking? Gee, I'll ask my parents to buy me that $20 GPIO adapter and get them to let me plug it and my soldered electronics into a PC. And if I screw up, as I'm bound to do eventually, I could conceivably damage my $500+ PC, and good luck getting my parents to get that fixed or replaced any time soon. I blow away a $35 Raspberry Pi, nowhere near as painful.
If you're a ten year old kid like some of us were in the 1980s, do you think it'll feel like a good idea plugging in one of those GPIO things into your PC hooked up to hardware you soldered up together? If you screw up you could conceivably damage or destroy your PC, and your parents are going to kill you as it cost them $500+ to get that thing for you. On the other hand, with a $35 Raspberry Pi, that's in the range of something a kid these days can actually save up for from their allowance, and if they screw up and destroy it, que sera, sera. Might hurt a little, but not on the same level as damaging a PC that costs several hundred dollars.
I shoot videos with my DSLR. And I have often wanted a portable HDMI monitor for my rig. When I looked, I was quite surprised to find out that no reasonable options exist. Most portable HDMI monitors utterly suck. They are bulky and max out the resolution at 800x480 or 1024x768. The ones that do not suck are uber expensive. Since this is just a hobby for me, I did not want to shell out the big bucks.
I have been quite surprised that I can buy a $200 Nexus 7 tablet with 1080P display, but cannot get a 1080p or even a 720p portable monitor for anything even close to that.
Whoever said that it was just about learning to program? Learning to program is easy. You can do it on literally any PC, with only a web browser and a JavaScript tutorial website. Embedded systems interfacing is much harder to learn on the PC these days thanks primarily to how complicated the hardware has become.
How many GPIO pins does your ARM tablet have by the way?
Just plug something like this into your tablet.
You know that open usb io board is twice the cost of a raspberry pi, right?
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
i've not loved the ARM "all-winner" tablets. the manufacturers usually put poor capacitive touch and they are troublesome to CWM
The original spirit of hacking was finding ways to make hardware do things far beyond what its creators intended or even realized was possible -- pushing it to its limits -- either by altering the hardware itself (like by soldering new connections), or by reprogramming the firmware. It takes a great deal of raw creativity of the sort that the vast majority of adults lose before adulthood, from what Ican tell, and for experienced hacking, highly detailed knowledge of the hardware.
The software-focused activities you describe use a different, more guided form of creativity that builds on existing creations or concepts. (The potential exception: "playing with pretty pictures" if they'refrom scratch or a new way of combining existing elements.) Within those endeavors, you're not likely to do the technological equivalent to a kid (or artist) painting the sky lime green just to see how it will affect the way the classic-green grass looks -- but the tech-equivalent might be exact what you'd try if you were cobbling together pieces from a few failed hardware projects to see if you could make a robot that can detect salinity levels in tears.
Hopefully real hardware hackers can pitch in and come up with a better explanation than this. :-p
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Yes that would be my argument too, but why not an arduino?
I have devices here that I bought from run of the mill hacking websites that speak SPI, I2C, TWI, UART, and can be scripted and bitbanged to communicate in any protocol I so choose. They also offer basic ADC, and PWM. Hell one of the little adapters I have even speaks natively to HD44780 based LCDs.
What can you do on the RaspberyPi which you can't do with the appropriate card on an actual PC?
Because arduino does not run python.
And so we come a full circle, just like the Ouroboros.
The R-Pi is a nice and cheap devboard from Broadcom, don't get me wrong. But somehow ... all the hype about "school children that cannot program" has a false taste about it. Guess I sound like one of the Yorkshiremen, but I prefer my microcontrollers being programmable in assembly, and delivered in DIPs.
One problem going via USB: It's less predictable, timingwise, for near-real time applications than the old RS-232 driver. Example: Controlling a PCB mill.
also: The 9 inch touchscreen would be sweet, if you want to build embedded devices where you need to display readable graphs and data as well as integrating a touch screen interface. At a £75 price point, it still beats using an android tablet and a GPIO breakout kit. Also, I hear the Pi has mounting screw holes now? A tablet doesn't.
Arduino is very "light-duty" - this summer's best Arduino board had an 32-bit ARM processor at some 80 MHz, with 512 kB of flash and 96KB of RAM.
Meanwhile, the Raspberry PI runs at about 1GHz, has 512 MB of RAM.
Meanwhile, an x86 (64 bits) processor runs 4 or more cores at 3+ GHz and can access 16+ GB of RAM.
None of it is "better" than the other, they're just optimal for different tasks - Arduino for easy hardware work, prototyping and very low power, Raspberry PI for more processing power at a low price, and so on. Just like some people need a semi and some need an ultracompact car
Hardware dudes doesn't feel the pin states switch, they causes them by just waving their hand over the board.
That usually means that you have to add a capacitor somewhere.
The Pi is cheap to the extent that you can throw a bunch of them at specialised applications and use them in environments where you wouldn't risk other options. It's cheap to the extent that you can play around with electronics, without agonising about the cost of doing something stupid. It's low-powered - you can run one on AA batteries making all sorts of mobile applications practical (the avionics for a drone, for example). You can give them to your kids to do with as they please.
For the form factor, they are *powerful* little beasts, making them extremely flexible. Try running python and gpu-intensive code on a pic controller.
Of course, your imagination *does* limit what you can do with them.
Why are they raising money for something that already exists?
http://www.chalk-elec.com/?page_id=1280#!/~/product/category=3094861&id=14647633
Or, better, get a BeagleBoard and a LVDS board.
Clearly you've never programmed bare metal as we did in the days of the Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore PET, etc.
It was *fun* back then. There wasn't even a debounced keyboard driver for most of those machines. You had to map the bits of the IO ports to individual keys. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Do not forget that there are still lots of ways to get all the parallel I/O pins you want on a tablet... run a USB link to an Arduino.
No sense much trying to do a lot of numerical heavy lifting with an Arduino. It simply does not have the horsepower or memory for it. It can act as an intermediary between a tablet which has all sorts of horsepower, and a platform controlling motors and reading sensors.
If the application is quite menial ( say datalogging ), an Arduino can handle it quite nicely on its own when coupled with appropriate storage blocks - but in and of itself, just maintaining a FAT filesystem alone would be difficult for an Arduino, yet a piece of cake for a Raspberry Pi.
I am presently building with an Arduino platform and note I am taking a significant amount of its resources just to deal with two rotary quadrature encoders and two LCD displays.
I am aiming for absolute simplicity. I need lots of low speed I/O and bit-banging special protocols more than anything else ( and I can get it via Arduino's I2C bus ). I will continue with this, but if there is any significant numerical analysis or display, its going to have to partner with something else to do the heavy stuff.
As it is, I intend to use a Parallax Propeller chip if I exceed Arduino's capacity, as most of my needs are menial bit-banging protocols to interface old technologies to newer stuff - and I want it all done in parallel so I do not have interrupt, timing and latency issues. The Propeller chip has eight cores, running in parallel, so each core can be tasked with an individual menial thingie ( UART, SPI, I2C, video, audio, DMX lighting, whatever ), and they will run in parallel without contention or timing issues from waiting for the program counter to be handed to them.
Andre LaMothe has developed a "Chameleon" board combining an Arduino with a Propeller chip if you want to explore this avenue.
A Raspberry Pi would do everything. But then, sometimes a hand calculator comes in handy when you don't want to launch a fullbore compiler to evaluate some mathematical thingie you dream up.
I see a Raspberry Pi ideal for those places you would normally put a full-fledged tablet in... say an interactive kiosk with full display and TCP/IP networking. It has the horsepower to do darned near anything. And lots of hardware I/O as a bonus, where the Arduino solution involves channeling everything from the tablet through the USB bus or network link ( YellowJacket, DiamondBack, or similarly equipped Arduino ).
I guess one of the things I would like to see most is some sort of interface which would adapt to any LCD display out there and let me drive it with the Raspberry Pi output, as there always seems to be some defunct LCD display somewhere that I could repurpose.
Maybe something down the lines of this
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Yeah, I'm fairly sure it's not the only one around either. I can't imagine that price point is a particularly high barrier to entry, easier than getting yourself a raspberry pi and £75 screen. Either way there are plenty of ways to get into hardware hacking outside of raspberry pi and a usb GPIO board for your PC, laptop or tablet is a pretty accessible one.
This days, you can _really_ program the bare metal. You can get an FPGA board with chip capable of holding an AVR core and a plenty of left-over logic blocks for $80-100.
Just drivers? You could actually write yourself a C64 or an Apple ][ in Verilog/VHDL now!
The 19" isn't portable, like someone else also said. The 7" is a second hand one, they are $129 new and have a native resolution of 800*480.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
Everything I've seen indicates an ARM tablet is the cheaper, smaller, lighter, lower-power option once you factor in a screen.
If you've got anything to offer, other than baseless assertions, let's hear it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You're an idiot
Thank you for this elaborate, well thought-out argument. It clearly demonstrates your superior analysis of the topic. Deep insights like this are what make Slashdot worth reading.
I just wonder why you refer to yourself in the second person.
The Pi is only $35 for the bare-bones (actually $40 on Amazon). Throw in power supply, case, SD card, etc., and the price more than doubles. You can absolutely pick up a complete PC, off-lease or refurbished, for less money.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They got the aspect ratio right, that's for sure. Can't say that for many monitors coming to the market since 2007.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Two reasons:
1) I can super glue it into a home-made device of some sort and not have two worry about cost.
2) You can give it to your kids and keep a SD image ready and you no need to worry about them going "what happens when I do "sudo rm -rf /".
Both are not about just programming. They are about understand complete systems. You don't need to use a Pi, but they are cheap and fairly well supported.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
You can also use the popular Raspberry Pi platform and get access to a large community of enthusiasts who understand the platform in a fairly deep level.
*sigh* you really have not done any hardware hacking have you. Hacking requires flexibility - with a Pi you have a screen, or not. You could argue a PC isn't efficient for the same reason - you could have a game console, a tablet and an android netbook for the price of a decent workstation, and many people go that way, and it's not a bad thng. Generally hackers go with the more flexible kit though because it'll serve them for the tasks they haven't thought up yet.
Given that Atrix dock is cheaper than the target price and can be hacked (and we did just that at Google when Hexxeh interned there), why not just make a plastic case with a couple of connectors on it, and clip the Pi into it?
real men program so close to hardware
Pfft. Real Men are hardware.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I bet you say SEQUEL. You sicken me!
...and you no need to worry about them going "what happens when I do "sudo rm -rf /".
Either don't give them root access, or use it as a learning experience where they can learn not to run commands they don't understand, how to re-install an OS and the value of backing up any data they had on that computer.
Just drivers? You could actually write yourself a C64 or an Apple ][ in Verilog/VHDL now!
In theory. The free versions of the development tools are pretty bloated and horrible and nothing that will keep the interest of a teenager.
For building computers with logic gates Minecraft might be more accessible than FPGAs.
I never got that "learning to program" excuse. Just install Python on whatever computer you're using right now. Why do you need a separate piece of hardware that doesn't even have a screen??
Yep, that's about the response I'd expect from a Python programmer.
No sig today...
Men are not the only people who program.
Clearly you've never programmed bare metal as we did in the days of the Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore PET, etc.
It was *fun* back then. There wasn't even a debounced keyboard driver for most of those machines. You had to map the bits of the IO ports to individual keys. :)
These days we use Arduinos. Try writing a software TV output or SID chip emulator on one...
A Raspberry Pi is a bit too much like having a real computer.
No sig today...
You clearly don't understand cost analysis. A cheap tablet plus an Arduino or similar attached to it provides all of that without an additional computer since you can install a more full-fledged Linux on some of them, or you can install more Linuxy bits in a chroot and use that to run even the IDE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are we not men (who program)?
We are Dev(el)o(pers)!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Which defeats the silly monitor they're talking about - at a best case "goal" price of US$100 (already 2/3 of the cost of existing retail solutions quoted in the article), its not a throwaway piece.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Yes, I have one myself and it's a great device. I also use it as a portable HDMI montior but the keyboard makes it a bit cumbersome. But they are getting harder and harder to find and also the new found interest seems to be driving prices back up.
Nonsense. For the other stuff you need to buy, a case is the only one that has to be custom made, but I bought mine for only about $8 from RS as I recall. Most modern mobile phones have MicroUSB chargers that can readily be used with the RPi. The official power supply from RS was $15 when I bought it, and now I wish I hadn't, because mobile phone chargers that can produce 5V/2A DC can be had for less than $5. And who the hell doesn't have tons of old SD cards lying around? I have dozens of old 2GB-4GB cards lying around, gathering dust, left over from old digital cameras and such. In any case I can buy a new 4GB card for approximately $5 (or an 8GB for $8), and that's more than enough space to install Raspbian. Total bill thus comes up to $35 + $8 + $5 + $5 = $53.
Now, I see that you can probably buy a refurbished 300 MHz Pentium II-based PC (which is how powerful the Raspberry Pi's processor is said to be on their FAQ) for $60-$70 or so, but it would have only 64-128 megs RAM (good luck finding more RAM compatible with it), and probably an old IDE hard drive that is smaller than the $5 SD card (sorry, SATA didn't exist when that machine was manufactured), and no or very primitive 2D/3D acceleration (no luck doing H.264 decoding on such hardware, so it can't even run XBMC), and it consumes ten times more power. So you just spent $20 more for a machine inferior in almost every way to the Raspberry Pi. Good call.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
and is all but impossible on mobile devices
Now you are just spreading FUD. LMGTFY
Yep, some people need a semi, some need an ultra-compact car -- and some need a minivan. And, just like Raspberry Pi users, the minivan drivers will catch a lot of grief from people whose self-image is somehow wrapped up in hardware choices.
Either this one slipped by passed the majority of mods, or I have a warped sense of humour. If I had any mod-points, this would definately get +5 Funny.
Either don't give them root access, or use it as a learning experience where they can learn not to run commands they don't understand
Learning experiences are all about doing things you don't understand. Or at least, don't fully understand yet. Don't teach them not to try new things, teach them to know when they're taking risks and to plan for what they'll do when things go wrong.
The biggest obstacle to using the RPi in a lot of projects is the cost of a monitor. You'd think with all the cellphones out there small monitors would be easy to find but really there's nothing for under $150 worth your time.
The way I see the Pi is the point is the kids do get root. They get to own the computer and as "reinstall" is "dump data on a SD card" it is "safe" to work this way.
It is not the only way you can do this but it is cheap (good for the parent) and completely customizable by the kid and becoming fairly well supported by the community.
As part of an IT course I could easily see this "spilling out" of IT, your programing section teaches you language X, the metal work class has you make a case, the electronics class has you make use of the GPIO pins and you write your English homework in Abiword on it.
Plus the price means you could give one to each of your student (or at least give a SD card knowing that they could buy one and it would be identical to the one at school when you plug in your SD card).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Personally I don't see the monitor as part of the "learn programming" goal. The monitor that fits that goal is your TV or an existing monitor.
I see the monitor as part of the second life that has taken off around the Pi. A tool for small PC that geeks play with. I'd like a little monitor like this to make a small cheap video conf. solution. Yes a pair of 6” GoTab DIG!T tables would be cheaper and simpler, but not as fun.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
And it stays on the floor plugged into the wall drawing as much electricity as a incandescent bulb. But it's the same thing...
we eat european babies....
I want to eat a baby! Get in mah BELLY!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
7" HDMI Screen
9.7" HDMI Screen
Far more work than soldering together some CMOS 3.3v logic together I see. And a lot more expensive too. Definitely out of budget for a ten-year old hobbyist's allowance.
Because it can run off of 4 AA batteries for a very long time or run off of a $12.00 solar panel. Let me guess, you ASSUME that everyone on the planet has electrical power or Stable electrical power.
get me a low power display and suddenly you have a computer that is useable in a 3rd world classroom that can run a lab of 10 of them for a day off of the teachers car battery.
Rich people hate it because it levels the education playing field.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You already can, get a 3-4 inch $12.00 rear view camera screen and do it. Hell I have one running the pong clock on my desk right now. 720X480 is good enough for 99% of the projects out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not possible with a PC? you dont know much about pc's.
I can do a LOT more with a PC than a pi. interface to a lot more than the pi could ever dream of.
the pi is CHEAP and very low power. it can not do more than what a full blown PC can do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I do get what you're saying. Most people using a Raspberry Pi would probably have a lot of the needed stuff already. There's a couple problems with that though. As far as USB chargers go, I actually don't have that many extras. I have the one that came with my current phone, but I still need that for my phone. I don't want to have to unplug my Pi because I need to charge my phone. Also for SD Cards. 2GB won't get you very far. I know this because I downloaded the base image for Debian which was a 2 GB image. After I installed the updates and a couple extra packages, the partition was filled up (skipped the expand partition step). I think it really depends on what you'll be using it for. If you don't actually need the GPIO ports, one of those Android sticks (many of which will also run Linux) are a much better deal, as they come with all the needed accessories.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Or you can just simply buy a $200 laptop that is magnitudes more powerful?
Cool. Do they speak either HDMI (Ideally) or analogue TV?
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
i just want to understand how do americans get so fat?
A book called "Eat to Live" explains the issue quite well. Dr. Joel Fuhrman points out why our diets cause weight gain and how to fix it... but most people would rather die. The book is well worth a read and available at libraries as well as bookstores.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
The Parallax Propeller looks very cool.
However, I'm a big fan of the XMOS chips, which also provide multiple cores and logical cores that provide guaranteed timing. Really great performance. They've recently made two announcements that are worth mentioning to slashdotters that have read this far into the thread:
A $15 development board (startKIT) that has a Raspberry PI interface built in (or can be used standalone), and
A new SOC (xCORE-XA) that marries an ARM processor to an XMOS processor.
In both of these products, you would have a high-level component controlling the very slick, very powerful, I/O processing of the XMOS chips.
I am not associated with XMOS (despite sounding like a shill). I just use their chips in several research projects.
Or you can just simply buy a $200 laptop that is magnitudes more powerful?
Sadly, the $200 laptop will probably lack GPIO, so you'll still need the Arduino. Even LPT ports are mostly gone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are talking about software, you haven't mentioned hardware. One of the big uses for the Pi is not making yet another PC but a cheap hardware development platform. If you want to make a robot with a web interface, web cam, and plenty of processing power, you aren't going to use android or an X86-64 PC. Linux running on the Pi can interface with motors and sensors using the onboard GPIO while giving the user a real OS to work in with plenty of memory and video. It can also run off of a relatively small battery which is also very important.
>Only if you don't want a monitor with it.
You plug it into your existing tellybox (or a new one for them ). That is how I see my daughter using hers when she gets a little older.
Personally I see the monitor mentioned in TFA aimed at the "adult hackers playing with their new toy" set of the RasPi market rather than the "kids having complete ownership of a computer" part.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Nintendo DSI screen?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Power supply? Free - already have one from an old broken router. Replacements can be had at any secondhand store or yard sale. SD card? $5 if you only need 4GB. Case? Not absolutely necessary.
If they want people to pronounce it "HD my Pi" they should call it "HDmiPi" or "HDmyPi", not "HDMIPi" which people will read as "HDMI-Pi". Sorry about all the "quotes" in my "reply".
"lasers".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
"This post describes how to start a screen session in linux (specifically raspbian for raspberry pi) and then connect to it using a kindle (k5 touch, but should work with other versions too) and a usb cable: you will type using the keyboard connected to the raspberry (or any linux pc), using the kindle as a monitor."
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=216501
You're right, it isn't that cheap, gets expensive fast, and even then makes a lousy PC.
This.
People who are using a Pi as a general computing device are straight up morons. Unless you really need the form factor and function of a Pi there is no reason to ever buy a Pi. The keyboard, mouse and monitor is going to cost the same if you're buying it for a traditional form factor PC or a Pi. So the cost is the unit itself, which by the time you get done buying the Pi, a good SD card and wall wart for it you're going to spend more on the unit than what you would a reliable single core PC from the local Goodwill that will smash the Pi in just about every aspect of standard benchmarks.
It's a nice little card for the maker/hacker crowd but aside from that it's pretty much worthless. There's a reason the general population isn't embracing the whole single-board-computer concept yet and it's mostly because they suck. Once you get into the ones with the good specs you're almost paying as much as what you'd pay for a low end PC from Best Buy.
Might be, but what they have to do with spirit of hacking?
I say, just realizing that instead of clicking buttons you can automate your everyday tasks, may be even simply with shell scripts, is already in the spirit of hacking, as well as the next step of realizing you can extend them to do much more interesting things than simply replacing a human clicking on buttons.
Why do you need GPIO to feel that spirit?
More importantly, why do you feel it's so important to knock a path that someone chooses to walk and they find real fulfillment? There's a dedicated culture of tech enthusiasts surrounding the Raspberry PI. No one is asking you to contribute one red schilling. You have your way of doing things, I have mine, and the Pi folks have theirs. As long as we all bear some kind of fruit from our harvests, try celebrating diversity instead of knocking it. You'll make a lot more friends and the world you experience will be a better place for it.
I have a TNC (Amateur radio modem) piggybacked on my PI. A small low power screen would be great in the field.
The DSI port looks like a waste of space on the board, while the graphics interface in general is a pain due to the driver/firmware not being open.
Same shit everywhere, I bought a Beaglebone Black and ran into major issues trying to setup a crosscompile environment because that's the absolutely only way to insert the driver blob. There isn't even a single distro with the blob built-in, every single user has to setup this cross-compile environment which doesnt work with newer kernel versions.
Adding to the tragedy is the fact that the only gpu with open drivers comes with the A20 Allwinner chinese chips from Olimex. Is that really my only option?
When you are not programming bare metal or at least a RTOS, there is very little distinction of the hardware delay vs Software delay.
What is RPi latency to toggle a pin in Linux BTW? i.e. software delay going through the layers of software and driver abstractions?
Negative
DSI = Display Serial Interface
http://www.mipi.org/specifications/display-interface
"Lame" - Galaxar
Hardware dudes cause the change in pin states by snipping the right diodes out of the array. Steve Ciarcia once said his favorite programming language was a wire-wrap gun.
If price were an issue, schools wouldn't be giving iPads to each student. The $35 for a Rasberry Pi probably represents the monthly cost for the school in just keeping malware off each of those iPads.
No, YOU just knocked down a straw man. You are the one claiming you can only get a 300MHz PII for quite a bit more than a Pi, which is idiotic.
In fact cheap used 2GHz+ P4s are quite plentiful, and have plenty of storage, RAM, fast graphics, etc.
And who the hell doesn't have tons of old computers lying around?
See, just like you, I can spout crap and make mine hypothetically FREE, too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What idiot modded him down. he is 100% correct.
HDMI is not ideal at low resolutions or at that price point. same monitor in HDMI will be over $90, composite video works great for that as it's easy to remove the connector and make the whole thing very compact.
on small screens you use LARGE text and it looks fantastic. if you think you will run X and use it as a desktop, then look elsewhere. if you are using it as information display interface (and you can get a touchscreen overlay for it) it works perfectly and a lot of RasPi projects are using them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
With the switch to HDTV, every cheap little TV out there has HDMI inputs
New ones do, I'll grant. Used TVs at pawn shops and charity shops still don't. I see CRT SDTVs in local charity shops that don't even have composite in; all they have is RF, with an analog tuner that only picks up low-power stations exempt from the switchoff.
HDCP isn't required to make HDMI function.
But I'd bet it is required to license one or more of the "HDMI" trademark, the patented connector shape, and the patented signaling mechanism.
Personally I don't see the monitor as part of the "learn programming" goal. The monitor that fits that goal is your TV
If you happen not to be able to afford a new TV, then you'll have to use the CRT SDTV that you already own or can get at a pawn shop. Good luck working at close to 320x240* like they used to back in the days of 8-bit microcomputers, as that's all a standard-definition NTSC TV can display through composite.
* True, analog video doesn't have discrete horizontal pixels, but composite video does have a luma-chroma crossover filter at 3 MHz, and sampling luma at the Nyquist rate of 6 MHz over the 47 microsecond width of the title safe area produces about 280 usable pixels. And though SDTV is 480i, interlace produces far more objectionable flicker in text than the nonstandard 240p mode used by pre-Dreamcast game consoles.
Just install Python on whatever computer you're using right now.
That doesn't help when you have access to someone else's computer for a half hour a week, with no privilege to install software, but would potentially have access to your own Raspberry Pi for an hour or more per day.
That's OK. Real Programming will make a Real Man out of anyone, regardless of what they started out as.
But price *is* an issue. Most schools *aren't* issuing iPads. Most schools hardly have the money to keep a couple computer labs running.
I can find an endless supply of P4 machines on ebay that come in under your 53 dollar price tag. I'm sure some of them even come with the keyboard and mouse which you completely neglected.
So, 4x the ram, 10x times processing power. 20x time storage. optical drive, probably 6-8 usb ports and numerous other expansion options.
Your posting is neither insightful nor informative, it's short sighted and purposely misguiding.
And don't get me wrong, I have a Pi and it's neat for what it does but it's the wrong path for learning to code or for a scratch workstation/server to learn Linux on. Unless you really have a need to stay low power and/or very small form factor there is no reason to run a Pi at all.
Two reasons. One, on the desktop it's hard to get into the programming that gets kids excited. A "robot" that handles your pet feeding chore for you is way cooler than printing words on the screen.
When I was a kid, we still cooked pudding, which had to be stirred non-stop while it cooked . I built a machine that did the stirring.
Also, while Python is very useful, there are things you won't learn with Python. Like learning basic arithmetic before you use a calculator, anyone working with technology benefits from understanding what's going on at a lower level and the Pi encourages learning about bits and bytes and how they relate to real things happening in the real world - motors spinning, lasers flashing, etc.
Some people who have only worked at a high level don't think they'd gain much, but most who learn are glad they did. You CAN drive without knowing what brake pads are, but a professional driver who knows what happens when he presses the pedal will have a distinct advantage in the mountains, where brake pads can overheat and fail. If you know how your car works, you'll know if a noise means "pull over immediately" or "change the pads this month". Programming is the same. Understanding low level as well as high makes someone a much better Python / .Net / Perl programmer.
With interrupts disabled latency in measured in nanoseconds. Of course for most applications, jitter matters more than latency. that is to say, if you know the latency is 100ns, you execute the instruction 100ns sooner. With USB, latency could be 100ns or 10,000ns, it's not consistent, so you can't control the timing.
And even if you did need low-power, a tablet or an old netBook would be cheaper and lower power... Even a NEW Acer ChromeBook is pretty inexpensive and low powered, while having far superior specs, including the screen.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Or think of yourself as a 30-year old kid who has a fascination with computers and stuff, the way I was last month, in the middle of owning my 4th or 5th gaming laptop. I did not even realize I could get a GPIO adapter to get me into hardware hacking. It took me about 30 minutes or so to screw with currents large enough to conceivably damage my $1700 laptop that I do not want to deal with getting fixed or replaced. I blew away a $35 Rasberry Pi, and the worst part was having to wait 2days for the new one to arrive.
The Debian distribution for the RPi is a full-fledged linux distro.
Have you ever used an RPi? They're $25. Show me a cheap tablet + arduino for that price. The arduino alone will be $25.
peek and poke..
Computers have gone downhill since they no longer have those programming calls. Sometimes, I just want to see what is in a specific memory location and other times, I just want to put something there. F**k pointers.
Wow! Thanks for the reply!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I think you are taking a extreme example here. Most school can not afford to give away iPads. To take a different extreme my daughters local school (in Greece) can not afford a room full of reasonable computers and uses hands-me-downs from its students and teachers.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Butterflies.
/* No Comment */
USB based parallel and serial adapters have much lower performance than bus based interfaces. They only work in some cases. Interfacing to a microntroller board via USB solves this problem if legacy serial or parallel access on the PC is not required and low level programming on the microcontroller board is acceptable.
I use PCI or PCIe serial and parallel adapters instead of USB adapters for legacy applications.
My Pentium II PC has 1GB of ECC RAM and 4+ TB of disk you insensitive clod!
It started out as a Celeron 300A but I upgraded it to a 1.2GHz Pentium 3. The Celeron 300A now has 384MB of ECC RAM and acts as my BSD router and firewall.
Inexpensive used RAM and parts are actually pretty easy to find for these systems.