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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
Negative
DSI = Display Serial Interface
http://www.mipi.org/specifications/display-interface
"Lame" - Galaxar