Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production

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149 pointsadeelarshad8250 comments

"The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output."

Is it just me, or does that sound like it might make a decent gaming machine, if you don't get too greedy about graphics?

If that's the case, the consoles are in trouble!

Graphics or simulation complexity -- I don't think it'd run Dwarf Fortress very well, for example.

In all fairness, by the colony's fourth year (given enough animals), multi-GHz machines with GBs of memory start groaning.

I need to convince pg that an open source Dwarf Fortress implementation is worth funding. Either that, or figure out how to build a cryptocurrency around it so that all of those Bitcoin miners can help simulate my fortress when its deflationary period starts.

Just pay them bitcoins to simulate your dwarves and your fortresses.

OK, but you could do iPad-style games. All you need is a cool input device. I'm thinking a webcam, and gloves with a specific bandwidth of color. Though the image processing might be too much.

Maybe for the input device just attach it to a big multitouch screen. Toss in a battery, wifi (maybe 3G?), ~32GB of flash memory. Then people could use one portable device and developers could write games and publish them to a central store for only ~1-5USD a piece.

That's on the very low end for consoles, all current generation consoles do much better than this. It sure beats an N64, but it won't run Halo.

My point wasn't that this device would defeat them, but that it's possible to make computers that are this ridiculously cheap. Add a little more horsepower you've got a serious competitor... And it should still be pretty cheap.

It is on par with a WII.

Aside from the lack of a dedicated GPU, anyways (the Wii's CPU is apparently just over 700MHz).

Gosh times have sure changed.

At 700MHz, this thing is clocked at nearly 100x the ARM3 I started out my career on. And it has a vector floating point.

It would be awesome building a really stripped down kernel on this with a basic graphics kit.

I hop they get the numbers right, because they are going to get a lot of orders.

I'm liking that Model A as a pocket-size emulation box for early games machines (specifically the SNES and ZX Spectrum).

I don't think the consoles would take a dent from something like this. If a game market evolved from this it would likely be niche and be similar to some of the smaller/toy-ish options you can buy already. I just can't see developers jumping ship from the big consoles (especially the way they now foster indie games) and making games for this lackluster (in terms of gaming) albeit cool device. If there was a way to make the device portable/cheap (some sort of small usb monitor)--that's a different story.

It certainly kicks the pants off the Xbox 1, if that ARM core's architecture can keep up with a P3.

I think I'm right in saying that it won't; as awesome as they are, they're not known for high workload per clock cycle.

Alternative option: With a few gigs of read-only memory, you could burn a game image onto it, and market a device dedicated to that single game.

You could just about eliminate any and all compatibility and piracy issues, you wouldn't require customers to have an existing console, and conceivably you could still profitably sell the game at $50.

It wouldn't be very environmentally friendly (you're forcing players to buy a new console for every game) but it could make economic sense.

The devices are certainly small enough to stack behind your TV; you just need a decent KVM switch designed to work with these devices.

waste of hardware as you mentioned. your idea would have been popular 7-10 years ago.

Depends on the case and the game.

I suppose you are right, if the game were facebook and you could buy a $50 dongle that has facebook and netflix people would probably only run that game.

"Substantially better than PS2, [possibly] about the same as XBox 1" is Eben Upton, the founders description of 3d performance. Theres an interesting interview on this here

http://foundationlibraries.blogspot.com/2011/06/cfl-podcast-...

He also talks about the original educational purpose behind it and how its expanded due to interest from the 3rd world and others.

I was wondering when this might come to fruition. Enthusiasts are often willing to put up with a tremendous amount of inconvienience. I remind folks of this that the Altair 8800 (and IMSAI) were, in their base models, something you toggled in your machine code into directly. PDP-8's and PDP-11's had core but if you had corrupted memory you had to toggle in the boot loader to get them restarted.

On a whim I wrote a quick 'virtual machine' (which is to say an emulator) for the PDP-11 on an Arduino 328. It runs faster than a 'real' PDP-11/40 (on which it was modelled).

My thought was that you could pull a copy of 2.9BSD or V6 UNIX from the PUPS archive and build an equivalent of the same system Dennis and Ken developed C on pretty easily. Add a terminal and you're good to go. However, I recognize that if you're going to the trouble to do it you should really take advantage of modern gear.

I'm glad to see that these guys are taking that approach, Linux might be a bit heavyweight (you could do a much simpler and cheaper DOS like OS) but it does have the advantage of lots of available software.

Standard modern distros are fairly heavy, agreed. But a custom distro can be super-lightweight and still include most features you'd expect from a desktop OS. In 2003 I was running desktop redhat on an old IBM thinkpad with just 32MB of RAM. So 128 should be plenty!

And here's a list of out-of-the-box light-weight distros: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/whats-best-lightweight-linux...

Great link, thanks!

One of the more interesting questions (and the Rasberry Pi creator is investing in) is 'learning about computers.' Which I truly support. (Local high school computer class was about how to use Microsoft Office, bleh!) Its one of the reasons have felt that Arduino's and their spawn are doing a great service of getting people interested in understanding what the computer is doing at a more complex level, before they open up their first kernel file and gaze upon the complexity therein.

No probs. And of course roll your own with Linux From Scratch: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ A great way to really learn Linux too :)

Original article here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=28

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2815724

Thanks for link. Original unreadable on iPad...

There is a gear on the lower left that will give you the desktop version, but I must say this kind of behaviour by web publishers putting tablets into such a weird format is annoying.

This is cheaper than the Arduino Uno from Sparkfun. Arduinos are running code in a loop -- this brings the benefits of an operating system to the world of hobbyist projects. I think it's a game changer if they can deliver on it.

I'd be interested in what this guy can do with a $100 price point.

Wonder how feasible it would be to have a similar device that you could cluster by simply direct connection, modular computing anyone?

It would be really cool if they offered this in an arduino form factor with i/o pins.

There will be a JTAG port, so there may/should be the option of some very basic I/O, but not to the arduino level as far as I can tell.

I the comments section of the FAQ, one of the team says:

"We haven’t made a decision on open hardware yet. We have SPI, I2C, UART and a fair bit of GPIO at 3.3V if you want to do interfacing."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=8#comment-89

So it sounds like it has as much I/O as you're going to need for embedded funtimes.

Now THIS is a modern Commodore 64. Really, really, really awesome. It's exactly what I've been hoping for for a while... USB in/out, HDMI out, and all in an unbelievably cheap package.

I can't wait to buy one! The $35 option looks great!

This is cool, but how is it different/better than a plug computer (honest question)? It looks smaller and cheaper. But not fundamentally different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer

One difference seems to be that it is started by a nonprofit vs. a commercial venture.

It's smaller and cheaper. Why isn't that enough?

It also has a video output, making it a computer that can be used directly (especially the $35 version with ethernet and 2x USB). The "*plug" computers are more geared to non-interactive use (file sharing / backup / etc).

The Raspberry Pi is more comparable to a BeagleBoard http://beagleboard.org/.

Well, there's the Guruplug Display, which also has a video output.

Isn't the absence of wifi hardware pretty crippling for a small portable device like this?

Surely you can add that yourself with a USB dongle?

I'd definitely buy a couple, just to use them for streaming video around the house. Plug one into the screen, use a WiFi dongle or the 10/100 port and with a bit of code you have a streaming video receiver.

It's a £15 (GBP) device. Does that mean it'll be $25 shipped??

Technology/Gadgets are usually quite a lot more in the UK than the simple dollar conversion.

this combo bluetooth + wifi usb adapter would work well with it: http://www.amazon.com/Combo-Adapter-Bluetooth-802-11g-Antenn...

That one is unavailable. I'd suggest this one. http://www.amazon.com/External-Antenna-Wireless-802-11G-Netw...

Its only $8.40, it has an external antenna, and a ralink chipset that I've had much success using on all kinds of linux distros. (Its internal antenna cousin is less than $8)

I wonder how the $35 version would work as a web server with an ARM11 & 256 MB of ram it might make a cost effective web front end.

128mb is enough to run nginx with static files.

I'm so excited about this. I want to get one for my 8-year-old nephew -- does anyone know of any good simple tutorials / manuals for linux for somebody just starting to program?

I'd love if this thing could be used as a boot jump drive in a fully featured computer as well. My dream scenario is having my work house computer with my file server, music and video streamer with a netbook thin client and a portable way to securely connect to it from anywhere. If I can connect to any monitor and keyboard and be remoted to my machine, or even better, boot into a thin client on a fully fledged computer and have my environment with me all the time... that'd be great.

I'm basically all of the way there, if I could only get an NX client built for my Cr-48. I think that things like this Raspberry Pi and Motorola's smartphone-dock-powered-netbook are going to be rather big soon.

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