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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."
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Don't be a doofus. Is the 19" one portable? No! And that is important to some of us. We already have large/cheap displays. We want portable/cheap displays!
The 7" one you listed is utter joke. First of all it is not under $100. You forgot to look at the sneaky $70 shipping charge. After you add that, you are looking at $150. Oh and you also forgot to look at the resolution. 1024x768. It seems that you haven't been paying attention. But, by now, that isn't surprising.
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.
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.
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
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]
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?
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.
A fair point, but there are many, many, MANY others without the ridiculous shipping charges:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Car-9-Digital-Stand-alone-Headrest-Monitor-Screen-HDMI-VGA-Port-Touch-Button-HD-/171098185346
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
real men program so close to hardware
Pfft. Real Men are hardware.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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...
Don't be a doofus. Is the 19" one portable?
It could be. Just tell everyone its your MagnumPi.
Are we not men (who program)?
We are Dev(el)o(pers)!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
7" HDMI touch, under $100:
Not at all comparable. For a start it's a private one-off eBay listing, not something that anyone can buy from a website. It is also not HD, and in my experience you often can't use this kind of screen's native resolution directly as it is designed to only accept SD, 720p and maybe 1080i. That's okay for a TV but useless for a computer where you want sharp pixel perfect font rendering.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 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 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.
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.
He carriesa lot of taffy in his pockets, so if the RasPi is in his pocket it get's Taffed.. some taffy is so sticky it will pull chips off the board.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Pi does not need an OS. you can run software directly on the bare metal. What moron told you it needs an OS?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Those are called shrooms, and you find them more on Cow shit than horse shit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Negative
DSI = Display Serial Interface
http://www.mipi.org/specifications/display-interface
"Lame" - Galaxar
That's nice, but not HD. The 9.7" is close to HD, but only available in a minimum order quantity of 10 units. The project name is a play on words - HDMI-Pi = HD My Pi.
Neither display indicates being able to receive a signal at the native resolution.
The cheapest available option on the Kickstarter is 75GBP, or about $120 USD.
Here's a bare 10.1" 1366x768 for $89
There's also a 7" 1280x800 display with enclosure, VGA input, etc. for $129 shipped, although it's currently out of stock
I don't see how this is really bringing anything new or cheaper to the table. If they could get this manufactured and sold for a retail price of $50, that would be much more interesting, IMO.
.
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.