We’re auctioning ten beta Raspberry Pis | Hacker News Reader

We’re auctioning ten beta Raspberry Pis

raspberrypi.org

37 pointsrythie16 comments

"if you get one of the first 10 units you'll get a MAC address with a lot of zeros in it"

ifconfig <iface> hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00

By accident, one of the el-cheapo motherboards I used about 6 years ago ran with MAC 00:00:00:00:00:00. Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem — I could still communicate with my router and didn’t even notice this for a long time. But then I tried to communicate with my father’s IRIX machine, and we couldn’t get it to work. Until we realized the misconfiguration :).

Interestingly, using a WPA or WEP key of all zeroes breaks lots of cracking algorithms and thus is arguably more secure :)

Care to elaborate?

Perhaps a lot of brute-force try-them-all routines skip the all zeros option, and others consider an all zeros result to be invalid (internally mapped to a "no match" result or so forth). A truer security through obscurity idea I can't imagine though so if that is the case "arguably more secure" is very arguable!

"if you get one of the first 10 units you'll get a MAC address with a lot of zeros in it"

And a price with lots of zeros in it, it would seem! (All in a good cause of course.)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-beta-board-10...

Currently more than 10x the normal price.

Great to see the entry cost of an embedded linux development kit dropping from over $500 few years ago, down to the price of a pizza or two. This means we're going to see more young talented developers with actual embedded system skills.

Will the Pi really teach you embedded system skills?

I don't want to be a cynic, but I don't see how this board makes it easier to control anything or interface to any other device. It's still Linux and it's typical set of drivers, right? How will the Pi or the upcoming add-on interface board let me connect an LVDS LCD or capacitive touchscreen? You mean I still have to hack up an I2C device driver and wire it up? I need to spin a kernel? Is there an open-source video driver for the Broadcom chip?

I think it's a nice idea to put a cheap laptop into the hands of students. But I'll be more curious to see what those first 10 boards will be used for other than tiny MP3/MP4 players. You're still in Linux-land and that's not the most friendly environment for embedded systems programmers.

Resourceful and talented developers can do a hell of a lot with a cheap Arduino or garage-sale laptop, they don't need a magical new Broadcom EVK to do this.

well, one can learn a lot of things if he or she is motivated enough:

* Building a bootloader from sources. Trying various boot media sources and ways to launch your code in the raw memory. Probably even some assembler stuff.

* Learning how an embedded system is built, from kernel patches to busybox

* Learning how a community embedded Linux project works, with Git workflow, tests and updates

* The board is small enough to place on a moving platform and learn how the real-time linux interacts with physical environment

And you can do all that with other EVKs like the Beagleboard. So the only "motiviation" is that it's $100 cheaper?

yes, for students it's definitely a good motivation. also it's easier to experiment with a device which is not too tragic to break

also it opens door for network computing, as buying 10 of them is not such a big deal any more

Price is unbelievable now.

Let's hope this isn't auction poisonning like the hp touchpad auctions.

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