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Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon (linuxgizmos.com)
DeviceGuru writes: The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page.
Bespoke is not "weird UK English". It's common English and used in the USA as well, I've heard and seen American colleagues use it regularly.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
News for nerds, stuff that matters!
Still waiting on eSATA with gigabit ethernet...*sigh*
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Don't forget the imminent $9 C.H.I.P computer, which has 4GB flash storage, pre-installed O/S, wifi and bluetooth built in for the price. Crazy cheap.
You can view videos just fine on it without paying to for a codec. now if you are trying to view an Archaic out of date and not even used anymore video Mpeg2 or VC1 using the hardware acceleration? then you pay. mplayer and VLC plays every single video format under the sun on it just fine.
Come on back when you actually know something about the Raspberry Pi and stop making things up to sound like you know what you are talking about.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Huh? What? Cannot play videos? Damn. I missed that memo. I've been using Raspberry Pis as an in-car DVR for my kids for a few years now. Never had a problem. Straight from MythTV recorded mpeg4 onto a USB stick to playing on Raspberry PI. Just plug in the USB stick and give the kids a wireless mouse.
Proprietary bootloader? RaspBMC was so easy to set up, I'm afraid I never really noticed.
As someone with a toddler and a bunch of Pi2s, that sounds like a really nifty thing to do. Do you have any information about how you built it, what components are used, etc.?
Q. What's the difference between an "Official" customized Raspberry Pi and any other customized Raspberry Pi?
It seems the difference is that they have the design files and the authorisation to do customisation at the pre-manufacturing level. Anyone else who wants to customise has to work with the completed boards.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Just to be clear -
A $9.00 smartphone can do all of this (and a lot more) without any contract.
However, if you need to monitor a remote location, the "triple minutes"
pay-as-you-go option is sweet.
If you are working on a project with lots of I/O, then a Pi makes sense.
BUT - if you are simply trying to do something that already exists as
a free app on the Google Play Store, save your money,
Most importantly, if you have not experimented with a cheap smartphone,
try it now. Some are better than others, so read the specs.
At $9.00 you don;t have much to lose.
Considering pretty much all OTA TV in the US is MPEG2 Transport Streams, saying that MPEG2 is not used anymore is a bit of an overstep. Anyone wanting to build out a PVR using a backend that captures without realtime transcoding needs to have the MPEG2 codec bundle.
All that being said, a couple bucks extra for that optional functionality is hardly an issue.
The cheapest NUC I can find on Amazon is around $139. The cheapest Pi I can find is $19.99 for an A, $32 for a B, and $39 for a Pi 2. At 3-7 times the cost, I don't think they are exactly competitors across the board. There is surely overlap, but that doesn't mean they will "eat the lunch" of the Pi in a space in which it does not have an offering.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They definitely have my interest, we're buying Pis and knocking off the USB connectors and replacing them with header pins for internal sensor gear that we're repackaging into a small container to resell. Thing is, right now we're moving dozens of the things (they are pretty specialized), we'd probably never be able to sell 5000.
It also doesn't help that Intel's actual attempt in the rPi range(the "Edison" boards based on 'quark' cores) omit video entirely and have deeply, deeply, limited GPIO. It's actually pretty weird: in their attempt to stay relevant in phones and tablets, Intel has actually built the most FOSS-friendly SoC GPUs around; but their entries in the cheapie SBC arena seem hell-bent on dragging defeat from the jaws of victory.
Most importantly, if you have not experimented with a cheap smartphone, try it now
But don't put your invention in a metal box and bring it to school.
You can view videos just fine on it without paying to for a codec. now if you are trying to view an Archaic out of date and not even used anymore video Mpeg2 or VC1 using the hardware acceleration? then you pay. mplayer and VLC plays every single video format under the sun on it just fine.
Come on back when you actually know something about the Raspberry Pi and stop making things up to sound like you know what you are talking about.
Seconded, I set up OSMC on my Raspberry Pi 2 and had the dead pool trailer playing on it the day it came out. Video plays really good on it and I was getting internet over wireless.. it works better wired.. it gets about 90 mbps or so. If you put a usb 3 ethernet dongle on the usb you can get just over 200 mbps. having usb 3 and gigabit ethernet would be totally doable in my view.
I cobbled together a security camera that can stream 720p MJPEG at c.a. 25-30 fps from a Raspberry PI over a distance of just under a kilometer to a PC with the help of a high powered USB WiFi dongle and a 12 db antenna. I was pretty happy with this since MJPEG is not exactly a good example of an efficient method for streaming video and the whole thing runs for 5 hours on a tablet battery in the event of power cuts. The video stream stutters once in a while at extreme distances but I put that down to crappy software and poor buffering rather than the hardware being overstressed.
The Pi plays an HD 1080i Mpeg2 stream just fine using a software decoder. And anyone using a mythTV backend is transcoding anyways to keep space consumed down.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm going to guess and say that anybody building a PVR rather than just a media streaming box is going to want something with a bit more .... harddisk, speed and ram than a credit card sized toy box. Mind you software decoding works fine on the Rpi2 with ffmpeg by all accounts.
Their element14 custom pi web site needs to move to the 21st century - it's absolute crap on mobile, and the majority of people on the web use mobile devices.
I can guarantee you the majority of people using element14's website do so with the biggest monitor they can afford and do so while having multiple products open in multiple tabs while comparing multiple datasheets and a CAD program in the background.
This is a classic example of a well function website that definitely does NOT need a mobile friendly page.
And where exactly does one go to buy a $9 smartphone? Aside from that, how can I get AppInventor to do a real language, and not the block-based visual programming that it seems to support? How about self-hosted development? AIDE at least supports self-hosted Java and C++ dev, which are more generally useful...but pretending that using any of these on a phone will be nice is a bad joke.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
So some engineer sends a link to their boss to show them what they are proposing and ask for a P.O., and the boss clicks on a mobile tablet/smartphone - approval denied because it looks like a cheap scam site on mobile devices.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I've taken on (adopted, really), quite some time ago, funding the local elementary school's entire in-class IT education. They only have 56 students. For instance, I've bought the whole school laptops and, this year, I bought them all iPads plus a half-dozen extras for eventual mishaps. The solitary IT staff and teachers really appreciate it but not nearly as much as the kids do. The bake me cookies, have visited my house for nature walks, invite me to plays, make me crafts, send me Christmas cards, and I usually even get a box of "I love you" Valentine's Day cards. It is awesome but their acting and 'music' leave a lot to be desired.
I say that because I want to ask this: You seem knowledgeable. These are K-6 students. The project type that I'm thinking of could be a long-term thing where the students would just keep the device. Financing is trivial, not even remotely an issue. What sort of projects could the kids, reasonably, do with these devices that they could us, say, throughout the year and then keep the device at the end of the year or, perhaps, half year? What kind of support would be offered (if needed, if any)? And would it make the solitary, just one, IT staff pull his hair out or otherwise hate me? Would they be used? Would it be beneficial at their level?
I specifically target the younger kid's education because they're local, they are fewer, and my actions can be more meaningful. The older kids get bused off to a larger school and I'm not fond of the administration there.
Thoughts? No? Just a passing idea but I suspect this would be something I'd need to prep ahead of time to make sure they're ready for incoming students next year as well as making sure that the teachers were familiar with them enough to actually give instruction. They could even make multiple devices or even make stuff that stayed in the school. Perhaps some sort of timer to control the sprinkler's for their little veggie garden? But I'm thinking things to take home. This number might mean that the students could use, damage, and simply keep the devices. It needn't be a single year that does the projects, either. This sort of stash will last them quite a while, I'd suspect.
It's kind of off-topic but I don't know if it's worthy of an Ask Slashdot and I don't generally submit anything for I am a lazy git and almost a passive consumer these days.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You are free to implement your own codecs. That's your right under patent law. Nobody is stopping you from doing so.
What's not allowed, is selling your implementation without permission, which is why you're actually complaining about.
The $9 cell phone is probably subsidised, because people who buy cellphones usually use them on a cellular network.
You forgot to add: No access to any GPIO, locked bootloader, SIM locked to a particular carrier
I can't find your $9 one, but the $15 one from Verizon is locked to only work with Verizon.
Yeah right, because an engineer's boss who approves purchase orders has never heard of the distribution arm of a multi national electronics company with $2bn+ in revenues, and bases their entire world view on a link from an iPad.
Or down here on planet earth (which is what we call this place, welcome by the way) you get told to do something and given a budget, procurement provides you a common vendor list and you just go for it. Any interaction is done by procurement who unlikely use a website anyway favouring pre-filled BOM tables they send off after being generated directly from the CAD software. Or you're a small office and your boss isn't an MBA who has a nose bleed trying to understand what a resistor is, and he'll have heard of Farnell / Element14. But hey they only make $2bn in revenue so maybe they need your design input.
Last time I saw someone update their website (who had an almost clone of what element14 has now) they faced incredible customer backlash and it took them several years to recover. Heck I know people who went back to using their paper catalogues as a result.
Don't mess with something functional in the name of some Web 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever we call the mobile crazed shit. If you're buying large bulk electronics orders or doing electronic component research on an iPad / iPhone you have bigger problems than the website interface being presented to you.
Go look at the mobile site. There's no excuse having something THAT bad, and that non-functional. What are you going to do in a meeting - decamp everyone to their various cubbies to look at the site when they need to check something that comes up in the meeting?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There's a bunch of speculation going on in this thread based on personal anecdote... let's have a look at some data shall we?
Let's compare the ngrams of the words 'bespoke' 'customized' and 'customised' between the USA and UK:
USA: http://tinyurl.com/usabespoke
UK: http://tinyurl.com/ukbespoke
You can see that in both cases bespoke had its primetime in the first half of the nineteenth century, falling off and hitting its nadir at around 1980, with a resurgence in usage since then.
However, it's also clear that the usage of 'bespoke' is more common in British English than it is in American English, although not by a huge margin - current usage (in books) is about 70% more common in British English than it is in American English.
Obviously the huge cavéat here is that these ngrams describe how language is written in books, rather than how it is spoken.
Meeting? You mean you have meetings with tablets? Are you working for some hip start-up? How quickly can your mobile phone access large files on your corporate network or display complicated car drawings, documents, etc?
What happens in meetings is that whoever is presenting opens the website. In a browser. On their laptop. If no one is presenting chances are half the people in the meeting have theirs with them. In the worst case scenario at least the scribe will.
I get the feeling the places you've worked are very different from the ones I have.
The places I worked for, I never bothered going to the meetings because they were boring wastes of time. Never missed anything either,but I *did* drive the bosses nuts. One-on-one conversations, making coffee in the morning and going around and talking to the other devs individually, got more done. The bosses couldn't say much because (1) I was the go-to person for all the programmers when they had problems, (2) I was the top dev, (3) I produced results, and (4) we eventually just stopped having meetings as everyone saw them for what they are - distractions, time wasters, bull sessions, and pissing contests.
Remember, the more people in a meeting, the less that gets done and the lower the collective intelligence of the group. No exceptions.
Unfortunately, most people don't have the courage to tell the boss "I'm going to the washroom." "When will you be back?" "5 minutes after this meeting ends."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.