I am in the process of sorting out my financial situation - tough founder luck. But I am happy to order a few of these (and monitors) and rent a small garage to give local kids a free computer lab to learn. (Kolkata, India)
I would love to get some insights. I have been wanting to get into some long-term model of social giving. I have been really lazy and only do regular donations to Watsi (YC funded) for about 6 years now. I constantly feel I need to invest more of my personal energy into this but I would like some guidance.
Is there somewhere one could read more about this? Sounds nifty.
Rent for a small garage would be about USD 35 / month. Electricity would not cross USD 50 / month.
One local school here threw away 50+ small dell quad-core i5's in their quest to make sure they spend their money wisely.
I've assembled a small lab, with many computers, laser printers, scanners, tablets, projectors, big-screens, etc. Without spending a single dollar on hardware.
This has two effects, it reuses a resource that was destined for destruction, and it doesn't add fuel ($$$) to the ecological dumpster fire that is modern capitalism.
This is exactly how it's done in many places. A 10yr old computer is perfectly fine for this, maybe even older. Yes it might not play all youtube videos, but it works.
I think broad computer illiteracy in the general population has convinced people that you "need" a new, powerful computer. In reality, 95% of the population can get away with any decent computer from the last 10 years. Grandma isn't training a neural net, she's checking Facebook.
I continue to use a 2nd generation i3 desktop as a "daily driver" for a lot of my computing/server needs, without issue.
My primary laptop is a newer T25 because I couldn't resist the keyboard, but my primary desktop is still a 9-year old AMD FX8350; with 32GB of RAM and SATA SSD, I game, Lightroom, Photoshop, VMWare Workstation, and anything else I need easily enough.
Unfortunately, layer after layer of framework on abstraction on framework on abstraction sometimes means that we need a supercomputer to render a user interface, and still end up with perceptible lag. :)
Regarding elsewhere where I mentioned running BOINC on a Pi 4B, I'd also note that (at least from a RAC standpoint) it's almost up there with a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with an i7-640LM throttled to 1.2 GHz. If I switch the BIOS from "balanced" to "performance" mode, the ThinkPad will run a bit faster but within an inch of thermal shutdown. I might be able to overclock the Pi enough to achieve parity with the throttled i7.
Eight years ago, I'd never had guessed that we'd see the Pi turn the corner to become a usable general-purpose desktop.
Also, don't under estimate the performance of future SD cards.
v0, get it shipped
v1, improve
https://carcamcentral.com/guide/recommended-microsd-cards-fo...
I know there are other power down issues with SD cards and corruption well. I think in a class setting I would have important files replicated to an NFS server, with at least hourly snapshots.
Every Pi SD card has ended in irreparable disk corruption. The SD hardware’s wear-leveling and delayed allocation is fundamentally incompatible with any device without a battery, especially with frequent writes.
The “official” solution for the Pi is to use read-only SD cards with overlayfs. That’s not the default and it’s not how entry-level users will use this.
+1 for i3. Been using my Thinkpad W510 with i3 non-stop since 2010 and it's still working like a charm. For the past months, though, I've had to use a Dell XPS 13 for work. Now that I've equipped it with i3, as well, it's merely using 3.5W while I'm doing ordinary computer work and some coding, meaning that I can get 15 hours of battery life easily, and often even 20h. Absolutely mind-blowing.
Hard to give more info, there isn’t just one auction site for all schools or counties, but a bit of googling will probably get you what you want.
On the other hand, you're often looking at "Lot of 38 Dell Latitude 5570 Core i7", "These items have been used by students or employees within a professional Community College environment. Items have been maintained, updated, and well kept.", minimum bid $5,800.00
Or something like "(1) Dell Optiplex 780, bad power supply, pickup in-person only, we don't ship" so you'd have to be in the area and interested in swapping a PSU.
It's a pretty sweet machine too, an HP Elite 8300MT from about 2012 or so. It has one of those side panels that can be removed by working a latch with your hand -- no screws necessary. I'm making it into a build server.
This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids, has all necessary interfaces to make something funny and can on worst even run from a manual energy-source (which of course is more relevant for a poorer country than a rich country).
I can see kids taking this RP400 around like a (paper)notebook, work with them at school, home, their friends home or somewhere else and motivating them to use them more than some stationary device. And because of the hdmi they even can switch places fast if neccessary, limiting the interuptions in their work.
Not usefully it can't. There's no display, so that "everywhere" is restricted to places that have an HDMI display just hanging out. Which is then a vanishingly small number of places. And since we're talking about kids - places with a front panel HDMI port, which is even rarer. Or you have to pair it with a portable monitor, in which case you spent as much as an entry level laptop and got something worse in return.
This is a cute little toy, and I want one, but that's all it is - a toy. Same as all the RPI's before. Good intro to hobby electronics programming with the GPIO, but not a disruptive entry-level computing experience, either. That place remains in the realm of the ultra-budget laptops, as they require no existing infrastructure.
Wait what? Doesn't virtually every TV sold in the last 10 years have an HDMI port?
Like where else can you use this other than a basically permanent installation at home for this to qualify as "taken everywhere by kids"?
The point I was trying to make, which doesn't seem to come across, is that spending $ on new equipment is a shortcut. A quick fix. Spending just a bit of time seeking out the sources of e-waste in your community, in the right technical hands, can pay off big.
You don't have to feed the beast. It doesn't take much vision to see that the action of paying $ into a system that happily externalizes all damage is part of the problem and directly contributes to the ecological and socialogical degradation we are all hopefully observing.
You can get all you need for hardware for free if you spend the time to seek it out and at the same time, you are helping clean up the mess.
We developers, many of us have been around from the time that 16K was a lot of memory, a 40MB hard drive could hold all you had, and 1 MHz was fast enough to play with almost any of the ideas in computer science. This is still true for many many tasks. I would argue that learning algorithmic complexity (big O) can be easier when you don't have a massive amount of compute that blasts through O(2^n) in about the same time as O(n) for many data sets. Try that on an apple II. A ten year old computer can have 16G of ram and run dual cores over 2GHz. You can learn a heck of alot of computer science with one of those machines. No need to feed the beast.
In the developing world electricity tends to be very scarce. Raspberry Pis, and stuff of that sort, are ideal for that environment.
But how much more? Just "a bit" or a significant amount?