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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."

13 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by glitch0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    -Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
  2. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by dido · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
  3. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by Fjandr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are tons of hardware add-ons to the Pi that are simply not possible with a PC (and difficult with most tablets).

  4. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by citizenr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  5. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by jareth-0205 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by rdnetto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
  8. Not just for Raspberry Pi by linuxguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by Calinous · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  10. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by msobkow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)

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    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  11. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by dido · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
  12. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by mlk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

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    Wow, I should not post when knackered.
  13. Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput by Crudely_Indecent · · Score: 4, Informative

    Negative

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

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    "Lame" - Galaxar