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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

1) You can hook this up to a TV.

2) Webcam isn't strictly necessary: You'll be able to "see" your teacher, type in chat, virtually raise your hand, etc.

3) This enables more advanced STEM (The "T" portion, really) not because it's a desktop but because of the built-in 40-pin connector opening it up to the massive catalog of projects that exist for the Pi platform already.

4) Perfect is the enemy of the good: You're complaining this isn't a perfect solution for those lacking resources. It's not. But it is significantly better than nothing, or a phone with a 5" screen and no keyboard.

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That 40 pin connector is a big STEM deal.

First peripheral I would sell is an add on breadboard station with lots of good sensors, lights, input controls, motor drivers and such that is buffered to prevent damage and start producing education kits.

> That 40 pin connector is a big STEM deal.

yes really, this is nearly spectrum-opposite of a chromebook (desgined to keep you in a prebuilt ecosystem)

If you can write code to drive hardware from pinouts I think you can click a button to enable Linux apps.

Writing code means not requiring Linux apps.

Pis don’t require Linux, they support Linux. If you want to teach kids on RISC OS like I was in the late 90s, there isn’t anything stopping you.

You were that is all true. I was speaking more to the Chromebook model, not so much what someone wants to or needs to run on a Pi.

I don't feel all that good about developments on things like iPads and Chromebooks. Not for stem type tasks.

official Raspberry Pi Sense HAT https://www.microcenter.com/product/453920/raspberry-pi-sens...

5x5 RGB LED matrix, gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer, thermometer, hydrometer, barometer, joystick sensor, all for ~$30 USD

Getting the POE hat in there somewhere, somehow, would be pretty neat.

The PoE hat - at least the existing one as we know it - won't work for the 400. Besides the 40pin header it also uses another 2x2 header behind the magjack, which is where it receives the input from the ethernet jack.

Oddly, this board spots a separate ethernet transformer which does support PoE, but there's no circuity to tap that, and nowhere to add it. Which begs for a modification, but seems like missed opportunity.

PoE seems off for the target audience of this device. In all likelihood the most prevalent mode of network access is going to be via wifi.

Oh totally. And I can see why they'd want to keep the component count down. Their regular keyboard is $17, and the 4GB pi4 is $55. So if you just duct-taped the pi to the keyboard, you'd already be $2 (plus tape) over the RRP of the 400.

The bit I don't get is why use an ethernet transformer at all, especially if they're not reaping the benefit from it.

Agreed that it’s a missed opportunity but a Pi with a GPIO hat attached and receiving power over PoE and in hand of a kid doesn’t sound particularly great

It's also Linux based on a properly supported distro that is maintained specifically for the rpi. You can do real hacking, not "try to get this to run" hacking.

Seriously. That counts for a whole lot. Frankly, that was one of the great things about the old 8-bit computers. They were constant in some ways. You could turn them on. And then go.

What we've got here is something a lot like that. But it has a lot more power connectivity. All the things the simple machines don't have. But it's all still pretty lean too. I'm excited.

Here you go https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/breakout-garden the easy way to add devices to the Pi. You add SPI and I2C devices and the sell a ton of different sensors, motor and servo units, etc

They’ve actually just bought out a breakout garden “hat” specifically designed for the Pi 400

Check out the PU Cobbler from Adafruit. It literally breaks out the PU header to a standard breadboard layout.

> 2) Webcam isn't strictly necessary

Not in our school district (Mass), students are required to have cameras on and showing most of their face.

The US is only a small potion of the world.

It’s a sign that more places than 1 may also have this requirement. You don’t have to make it a thing.

Well, you should probably fix that, but bureaucratic facism doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether something is useful for learning.

Yes, that's the sort of rule a school district makes once there's a minimum standard of technology access. I'm talking about school districts with large numbers of kids without those resources.

I ditched high school prodigiously as a kid.

I imagine if I were a kid now-a-days, but with the same hobbies I had when I was a kid for real i'd probably be deep-faking a wobbling face image pretty fast.

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