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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

What I'd really like to see is the ability to program this like an Arduino.

My Arduino's cool and all, but the extra power you'd get from this for the same price... Wow.

If it's a true linux PC you can just scp/ftp over binaries, just as easy as you could over USB with an Arduino. What it probably lacks is the digital and analog IO ports that you can easily access in the Arduino.

Right. Actually, I was thinking of putting the data on the SD Card, but it doesn't really matter how it gets there... Just that there are IO ports to mess with. I suppose a USB device could be made for that, though... If it doesn't already exist.

actually it does exist, i.e. the SerIO from SparkFun (which is a pretty neat device, btw):

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9521

but then you're back again at arduino, with the SerIO having a higher price tag than the device itself.

Well aren't they just awesome? :D I'm starting to really like them.

For twice the price of an arduino, the $25pc+SerIO could still be a really nice way to create some entertainment.

In fact, since it has audio out and SD card, it would already be cheaper than another project I was working on. lol

The Arduino would probably boot faster, though, so that's a consideration as well.

It depends on the chip they use. Most have tons of GPIO lines to use and they're pretty simple to access in Linux, even from user space. Now the question is if they'll expose them on the board.

From the elinux wiki:

There are approximately 16 spare GPIOs, which are brought out to 1.27mm pin-strip. Voltage levels are 3v3. The connector choice is deliberately annoying to connect to directly; there is no over-voltage protection on the board so the intention is that people interested in serious interfacing will use an external board with buffers, level conversion and analog I/O rather than soldering directly onto the main board.

We also bring 2x I2C (3v3), I2S and an SPI (3v3) interface out to the same connector. We support one slave interface for I2C and one for SPI.

http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard

The device will have USB and HDMI ports, in addition to a headphone jack. You'll be able to use it like a (tiny, cheap) desktop PC.

Edit: I'm not sure how easy it'd be to wire up sensors and such to USB. Don't some of Apple's ear buds send commands over the headphone jack? Does that require a special jack, or could it be done easily with normal hardware?

Edit 2: Would the GPIOs work for this? [3]

1. http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=8

2. http://www.raspberrypi.org/?age_id=43&mingleforumaction=...

3. http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#General_Purpose_Input.2FO...

Sending commands does require a special jack.

If its a true linux PC, you can just put the compiler onboard, where it belongs, and forget entirely about any further steps being required.

Arduinos are simple and slow. The stuff that you call "Extra power" (Linux, HDMI, USB, 700MHz, 256 MB RAM, etc.) adds complexity.

Many people have tried to make ARM versions of Arduino, usually with Cortex-M3 microcontrollers. None seem to have been very popular. Getting more power usually means more cost and always means more complexity; there's no way around it.

The most popular ARM arduino boards do NOT have any operating system (mBed and LeafLabs Maple) and operate bare-metal style like Arduino. These are growing in popularity much faster than you might think. The user experience isnt quite as smooth as Arduino, the community is smaller but growing, and the products are 30-100% more expensive, but in return you get 5 times the processing power and lots of other feature goodies.

There are some other products out there running .NET runtimes and basic real time OSs as well, but these have not really caught on.

Add an operating system into the mix, and as you said its a whole different ball game. That said, 700MHz is a lot of room to try and add a real-time Arduino style layer with access to GPIOs and such. You probably wont get 1MHz real time, but you can probably get 100KHz real time, which is fine for MOST things. Plus you get a network stack, and a display driver, etc. etc. to boot. Of course it cant be done for $25 (that is silly unless the project is nonprofit AND subsidized with charity or advertising dollars), but I would believe $70.

The software for such a device would not be anywhere near trivial to get right, but there is a neat product in there somewhere that a team of 3 or 4 could probably get going rather swiftly.

Of course, on a Maple or an FPGA you can really get crazy - with output timings accurate into the 36MHz and 150MHz range (respectively).

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