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Why the Raspberry Pi Zero Isn't a Practical Tool For Teaching Students (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This article criticizes the Raspberry PI Foundation's new computer the Zero. It points out that the Foundation says the purpose of the new Pi is to reach students but with all the needed equipment and experience it is ill suited for students. From the Hackaday story: "For development you need to set up the Zero with a power supply, mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter, HDMI cable, the USB OTG cable, USB hub, a keyboard, and possibly a mouse. After some hours of work you’re ready to try the software in your device. The cables are all disconnected and the board connected to the device. Tests are run. You pull the Zero out and plug everything back together for further software work. That’s going to get old really fast so you get a second Zero so one can stay in the device. Now all you need to do is swap the SD card. If you’re going to do that, you don’t need a second Zero since you can use a Pi 2 and get the advantages of its higher speed in development. Alternatively, you can use the USB OTG with a WiFi dongle, copy files to the Zero’s SD, and restart or reboot the device. Over WiFi you can also use SSH or a remote console to monitor the device’s activities. How long did it take you to figure out all the cable connections in the second paragraph above? Do you think a student without a hacker friend will understand that? Remember, the goal is to reach students who don’t know computers."
How long did it take you to figure out all the cable connections in the second paragraph above?
There was only one paragraph. Thank you, samzenpus. I was worried that the old failure machine was itself not doing well, due to the collection of surprisingly coherent and minimally-biased articles that have been on the front page lately.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's worse than that.
"This thing can't teach you anything because you won't be able to learn how to use it!"
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Reading it. Yep, thinking of all the junk we had to hook up for the 80s micros that I cut my teeth on. Sounding familiar so far. Let's see, let's install the sideways RAM, refresh the EPROM, hook up to one of the myriad different I/O ports, learn how to open channels to devices on serial ports over BASIC...
Not suitable for learning? Sounds better for learning.