Raspberry Pi: A £15/$25 computer to inspire young programmers | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi: A £15/$25 computer to inspire young programmers

bbc.co.uk

61 pointswlll36 comments

With the built in 1080p h.264 high profile decode[1] for £15 this could be the world's cheapest media centre. It might not be enough to run boxee, but should this go to market at that price, a lightweight media centre distro would definitely make this something else.

I think I'd probably buy two or three for hacking on.

I'm confused - he said its good for children who might not have a computer at home, but there is only an HDMI connection. What is the likelihood of a family not owning a PC - but does own a TV advanced enough for HDMI?

I think you'd be surprised how advanced and expensive some people's home entertainment systems are compared with some other parts of their lifestyle.

Absolutely agree. I help move some of the poorer families at our church, and I'm always astounded at where their money is spent. One family wore hand me down clothes and had little else in their house, but they had a 60"+ TV in their living room.

Most families have a TV, and just about every TV you can purchase these days has HDMI. I'm incredibly sad when my teacher friends describe how few of their students have computers at home to do their work.

If you look at the actual site (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) it mentions Composite and HDMI video output under the tech specs.

Thanks for pointing that out. I think this is a great project and hope it takes off. I would definitely buy one myself to play around with.

I was also surprised by that. Personally, I do own both a computer and a smartphone, but I do not have the HDMI supporting TV.

The official site: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

"In some ways, the project resembles the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme,"

"The volunteer team has to produce a better working prototype, has to show that it really can be manufactured for around £15,"

So yeah, it really IS like it... Especially in that their stated price won't end up being what they sell for in the end.

At the $25 stated on their homepage, I'd buy a few of them for playing with... Well, if it had an ethernet port, anyhow. A computer without an ethernet port isn't much of a computer these days.

Fortunately, URB-to-Ethernet adapters aren't very expensive.

But then where would you plug your keyboard?

USB hub, perhaps? They appear to be using one with many devices connected in the photograph on the official website [1].

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/ubuntu.jpg

If you need a USB hub to use one effectively, then the true price just went up by a third or so.

Why not make the thing twice as thick, providing room to add an ethernet port and a second USB port? Then much more of the associated costs will be incorporated into the unit.

I think "effectively" is really dependent on the end user. If the goal is to provide an easy and cheap system for school children to work with, much like the OLPC, then internet may not be something that is available or required for the target demographic. In the case of your standard hacker, it would obviously be awesome to have all the additional items on-board, but with the ease of adding a USB hub and all required additions to it you can expand on it as much as you want in what ever cost range you can afford.

Or USB->WiFi.

The mini-USB bluetooth adaptor that they currently have stock of in my local pound shop (for, not surprisingly, £1) (they look very like http://cgi.ebay.co.uk//300388440707 so may be the same thing) work perfectly will under Ubuntu (at least on 10.04 and 11.04). So as long as the bluetooth stack doesn't eat too much of that small chunk of RAM and network speed is not a big issue you could use the PAN or DUN profiles for networking on the cheap, tethering to a phone or a desktop/laptop with bt and PAN/DUN support.

The official site doesn't say anything about power but as the image only shows USB and screen connections I assume it runs off the power a USB connection can provide, so it could probably run nicely off a pair of AA or AAA batteries. I can think of a number of play projects for monitoring (attach a cam, mic, temperature probe, and so on via USB) or display (attach a small LCD screen and/or a beeper and you've got a portable status monitor for some other project).

Something like this could be great fun for a nerd like me to spend a bit of time playing with. A bit like an Arduino for a software-only person. If they do hit the market at the £15 estimated or there abouts I'd certainly buy a couple, as I'm sure would a couple of my friends.

I assumed (from the video of Braben) that it was the other way around; it's powered by the HDMI connection to a TV. This makes kind of sense, since it's a USB host. It allows you to connect stuff like keyboards and mice, which a USB device wouldn't do.

What's ... interesting about that reasoning is that according the Wikipedia, HDMI sources at most 50 mA at 5 V, which is 10% of what a USB root port is expected to deliver (500 mA).

Perhaps it will require a power supply, unless you can find a power-efficient keyboard. Shouldn't be impossible I guess, keyboards are fairly passive.

But it also supports composite out - if you were connecting the display that way it would need power from somewhere else.

Perhaps the connections seen at the top of it in http://www.raspberrypi.org/pcb.jpg are providing the power - it looks like they end up plugging into the USB hub (if that is the case then it must be a powered hub, but a passive hub could presumably be used if the board were getting power from elsewhere like a battery connected to those contacts).

I've not watched the video yet (no speakers/headphones handy) so I could be missing something they show/say in there.

True, for composite you'd need a different power supply.

I agree that the wires in the picture look like they're coming off of the USB hub, and also that the hub looks like the powered variety.

So, probably they'll go with at least one, preferably many, ways to power the machine externally. I hope they leave HDMI only as an option though, since it's incredibly neat.

Oh, and I agree with others that they should look hard at integrating WiFi onboard.

There are 802.11 USB adapters in the same form factor:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-deta...

It should be possible to power this thing with power over ethernet.

The micro-form 802.11 adaptors are noticeably more expensive than the BT ones though. I've seen the BT ones for £1 but the WiFi ones no cheaper than £9.

With PoE you wouldn't need a wireless connection at all of course.

I had a few vague thoughts:

* How is it powered? I assume neither composite video or HDMI can provide power to it (which would be cool), in the photo it looks like some it's probably powered from that ribbon cable that's soldered to the through-holes on the side. Would be neat if you could power it from (say) common older mobile phone chargers.

* I wonder which ARM SoC (system-on-a-chip) it's using,and what their open source support is like.

* Neat it has GPIO (general purpose input-output pins), I wonder where they are broken out? The row of 6 full-size through-holes in the photo look good, but it doesn't look there is much additional board real-estate for making other easy-to-solder additions.

* I know from working w/ WM8505 devices that ARM9 + 128Mb RAM is a fairly sorry combination for Ubuntu. I'd be surprised if they final device isn't built on something like Debian, they still support ARM9 (Ubuntu stopped after partial support in 9.04), have lower spec requirements overall, and their 'armel' package repository is huge.

  How is it powered?

USB port. No, wait, that doesn't make sense, if it's supposed to be a USB host. And you certainly can't draw power from HDMI.

If only their site wasn't so uselessly spartan!

This would be ridiculously awesome. Gumstix sell similar form-factor ARM boards for $130. You can get cheaper ARM boards (pico-SAM9G45 for $70: http://www.mini-box.com/pico-SAM9G45-X) but they are much larger. This is only somewhat larger than a Teensy++ (http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/), which is $24 but is powered by a diminutive AVR chip.

When you factor in the cost of a monitor or TV, keyboard, and mouse (plus any other peripherals required for your curriculum and the USB hub you would need to use them), I think that this $200 laptop is probably a more cost-effective solution: http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html

--- it's similar (but very much different) to http://www.MyLowCostPC.com project, that, unfortunately, hasn't raised, so far, the founds to develop it --- but the Raspberry Pi is much close to this one http://humaneinfo.com/pc.html ---

Looking back at the computing lessons I had in secondary school, I learnt a lot but I think that having access to something like this would have been much more beneficial than using Access and VB6 for coursework (in 2007).

I hope they can actually get the cost down to something close to the £15 they say. Good luck to them.

I've been wondering when this generation's Commodore 64 or Atari 800 would show up. It seems like it is the smartphone / iPod touch, but those just don't seem to do the trick for this type of stuff.

I do wonder what could be built while keeping the price under £60 / $100.

Wow. This looks amazing! Have contacted them and said I'd like to buy some, and I wouldn't mind writing or porting some educational open-source games on them. Great, great idea.

If you look at the specs. This doesn't include the cost of storage (SD card etc) which would push the price beyond the $25.

Still I am blown away by the size

I want two or three. No kidding. Any possibility to upgrade RAM? When will this be avaliable?

At 20€ they're going to sell like crazy.

> Any possibility to upgrade RAM?

Probably not; they're likely using a SOC with integrated memory.

Why don't they do a Kickstarter for this? Or do they already have the funding lined up?

Does anyone know if this could be made to run iOS?

I couldn't do it but I bet it's possible..

If not iOS, then I'd expect Android. The XDAers would be all over it, I think.

I doubt that - Android is a memory hog, even my phone has more memory than that.

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