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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.