Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC
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But there's a tiny[1] hint of regret that modern programming is necessarily abstracted away from the hardware. When people were using the popular home computers of the 1980s they would be able to use some version of BASIC, and then also some machine code if needed. And that wasn't something just limited to the brightest smartest young programmers; it was above average but nothing extreme. I learnt Z80 ASM on a suitcase instructional computer, turning fans on and off or stepping through traffic light sequences on LEDs. Then I made a resistor ladder DtoA convertor and pushed data out the parallel printer port for audio. (Something also done by No$GB emulator.)
That seems to be something that children will be missing out on, unless this project gives them enough boost to then investigate things like arduino or similar.
[1] Not a criticism in any way of the Raspberry Pi project.
A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without needing to download, install and use a compiler.
We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered harmful" sense.
As for programming abstraction; that is a ship that sailed long ago!
Especially if Apple have every super high-end pick and place robot booked for the next n years!
Amortising the tooling / artwork costs into big volumes helps, but even then the PCB is usually one of the more expensive items on the parts list.
One potential problem will be the cost of monitors, which might exceed the cost of the computers itself :-( But hopefully someone can make cheap monitors soon..
There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.
These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets rolling is the shaky part.
Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust to Broadcomm.
Roku has something with similar specs for $50 retail (which means they sell it to retailers at $30 at most). And Apple has something called "AppleTV", which has a little more hardware on it (wifi, power supply, ir remote receiver + remote, 8GB of flash), and sells for $90.
Amazing to think the impact of these low-cost computers.. goodbye expensive routers, NAS, set top boxes, PVRs, media centres. It can't be too long before they (ARM devices) start eating into the low end laptop market.
Something has always struck me as fishy about this whole thing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
How does selling SoCs at cost or a slight markup serve their aims? My guess, it doesn't.
What is fishy about that?
I see the Raspberry Pi project as an attempt by Broadcom to build some goodwill - but they seem more interested in doing so among society at large by producing a super-affordable computer for kids, than among nerds by doing an open source project. That's Broadcom's prerogative and I applaud what they are doing for what it is.
Personally though, as a hardware hacker, I am more likely to buy similar products using TI (BeagleBoard) or Freescale (Chumby Hacker Board) or Atmel parts, as those manufacturers have histories of being a bit more friendly to hackers, hobbyists, and small volume buyers. The BeagleBoard in particular is open source, there's development chatter on an open mailing list, and TI sells the same OMAP SoCs to small volume customers (right down to the possibility of a hobbyist buying one or two through a distributor, although at that volume you'll pay $50 for just the bare SoC).
But what does that get you? Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard, mouse. So you can only use it where those things are.
For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer. That would be portable. Useful for a student lab, at my Mom's house, in a hotel.
Just a thought.
BTW: I started programming in 4th grade, with printing terminals and acoustic-coupled dial-up mainframes. A few years later I had a then-equivalent of the RasberryPi: Dad soldered together a $100 Sinclair ZX-80 (likewise, the screen was your TV), and I programmed that thing darn near non-stop. Heck yeah the RasberryPi is "gonna be much use to a primary school student". Can't wait to get my kids going on it.
Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power.
So, we're talking about teaching kids to use some special kid-computer with software/tools they will never encounter ever again. What tools are these? A BASIC interpreter?
Linux costs 0, and runs on far less capable devices than the RaspberryPi.
"What Linux distros will be supported at launch? Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux will be supported from the start." (Raspberry Pi FAQ)
Been down that road, burned more times than I can count. I wish it were true, but I don't fool myself into believing it.
Load DSL (Damn Small Linux) on this, get gcc set up with a decent minimal text editor, and yes I'll start them with C++ from the ground up - akin to how I started, but with industry standard tools from square 1 and more introduced as they progress.
Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9 years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the same one, if properly partitioned).
And it's unlikely a hotel or your student lab would actually let you reboot into your own distribution; once you have control of the hardware (which you must have), you practically own it from that moment.
CherryPy is actually a much better solution than yours:
Your lab, and your hotel room, is likely to have a screen that can take VGA or HDMI input - so you've got a display; You can get foldable silicon keyboards for $10 or so, and a small travel mouse for $10 more. So, for $45, you have something you can _already_ use at your lab or hotel room, with no one having to fear you're putting viruses on their system.
But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.
Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.
Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.
If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.
What you can't do (Apple say) is run Apple OSs on non-Apple hardware.
Other than NetBSD, I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it.
But I will investigate. Thanks for the FYI.
I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook .
Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works. (And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )
Or maybe bootcamp could mention Linux.
This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?
The PowerPC macs are a bit less well supported just because there are fewer distros for PowerPC, but on the other hand, since apple's pretty much abandoned them, going with linux or a BSD has its own advantages
Yes, agree with Mr Binary - in a perfect world, computer hardware and software are completely divorced. The hotel wouldn't worry about viruses, because there would be no storage on their computer at all - I provide that with my stick. All I need is a 'kiosk computer', hardware that I can repurpose.
Not only do I divorce the OS from the hardware, but I separate the OS from my personal data. Unless I have both wholly residing in RAM (which I find generally faster than HDD or USB/SD), they are not on the same media. As much as possible I try to make the OS read-only and the media used for data (e.g. RAM for short-term data storage or HDD for long-term data storage) read-write. Perhaps there are parallels to certain object file formats and their separation of code and data.
I've also thought a lot about and experimented with the use of separate, simplified, fast-booting OS's for different purposes. I am forced to use different OS's to perform certain tasks. But the popular all-purpose OS's are huge and often I only need a small fraction of their functionality.
What if we did not think in all or nothing terms about OS functionality? What if some OS's were small and only limited-purpose?
Rebooting is the slow step. But these limited-purpose OS's, being small and simple, can be very robust and responsive once booted.
The smaller the kernel and userland, the more RAM I have for storage.
The first USB sticks came on the market in 2000, so I very much doubt you stopped using them before the Internet showed up.
Unfortunately, he represents a non-negligible majority of users out there. But I care not discussing anything with him and his like on HN. I've got better use for my time.
I have no doubt such companies have employees, or contractors, who not only monitor message boards on behalf of the company, but who post comments on them in a deliberate attempt to influence discussions in ways favorable to the company's interests. Whether they are effective is another question. But they are trying.
Younger readers should be aware of this as they are the ones being targetted.
Perhaps it's not that a majority of users are convinced price equates to quality control so much as a majority are aggressively manipulated in terms of what information about software they are exposed to.
It's not meant for us, it's meant for people with no computer, or maybe one computer they aren't allowed to (or don't dare to) fiddle with in case they break it. It's for educational use.
Why?
Keyboards and mice are pretty cheap these days. Monitors, not as much, but this can work with TVs, which are surprisingly common, even in the developing world.