Raspberry Pi computer in action | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi computer in action

bbc.com

27 pointsjestinepaul34 comments

The raspberrypi has had so much press and its not even in the hands of the public yet (although first 10k go out this week i think), while every article is great for the project, i'm just disappointed i dont have one yet.

Anyway, onto my point, i hope that the stories continue after its penetrated the hacker community and there is coverage of the million of cool applications that the computer has been used for. So much of the mainstream press lose interest after something is launched.

Here is something I don't get: while this project is cool, if cost is the goal, once you add monitor, mouse & keyboard, isn't anyone better off with a combo of eBay laptop + Debian?

>isn't anyone better off with a combo of eBay laptop + Debian?

No, not anyone. Hackers maybe, but not schools. First of all, you won't find 100,000+ cheap-but-quality laptops on ebay, not to mention you'll have to install Debian yourself. Not that it's difficult to install for "us," but these are targeted for school children. The whole point of this project is simplicity.

Any HD TV should work as a monitor, no? Presumably many people already own one. And USB mouse and keyboard are available dirt cheap.

It is intended to be connected to a television set via Composite or HDMI. I'd assume most families in the UK already have a television set so really the only additional cost is the keyboard+mouse.

The first thing that I ever thought when I saw the Raspberry Pi unit was how it would make a great device for MAME on a TV.

Hardware and firmware will vary across different laptops. This allows a stable platform for tinkering and experimentation.

I believe the intention is that if you break it, you can just turn it off and on and it's back to normal.

This was true of computers from the golden age of 80s UK home computers (where the R-Pi founders are coming from). It's not so much true of ebay laptops.

The BBC video is great. It reminds me of learning Microsoft "Extended Basic" on a Tandy Color Computer (aka, the CoCo) with a TV as a monitor around 1982-83.

Except back in the day, I had to deal with cassette tapes and only 4K (subsequently upgraded to 16K) of RAM.

30 years ago, I learned code by typing in hundreds of lines of (sometimes buggy) BASIC source code found in print magazines that came out only once a month. Today, all a youngster needs to do is a pull (and in just about any programming language) from Github. Progress is amazing!

Oh, but the things you can do without a monitor, a mouse and keyboard :)

OT: Can anyone give me a reason why this question has been downvoted? This seems like a valid, honest question.

Nice summary on the history of Raspberry Pi And loved the fact that they use scratch to demo it :-)

Maybe this is closer to the OLPC original goal??

Hardware is not the goal of OLPC. But it's an important component and a Raspberry Pi is not in the same ballpark as an XO laptop.

A kid in rural Peru is not going to have access to monitors, keyboards or the power required to run them. Nor will they sling a monitor over their back on the 5 mile walk back to their village every day.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this sort of comment is?

I don't think this is closer to OLPCs goal of providing a laptop per child. OLPC was, literally, "batteries included," they even had a charging solution for the batteries. The OLPC device as a tool for kids to learn about computers and programming was just one facet of its intended use. It was also a notebook, and a textbook and a communications device. The RasberryPi needs a screen, a keyboard and power, and even with those things, a Kid isn't going to be able to carry it arround and use it anywhere they want.

None of this is a criticism of RaspberryPi. I think cheap computers that kids can screw up and fix is a very good thing. And often, less is more.

You bring up an important point, I think, unintentionally. Kids may be able to 'screw up and fix' the software components, but it would be very cool to also allow the same interaction with the hardware.

I feel like maybe a version of the RaspberryPi that ships assembled on a breadboard with replacement parts - more expensive, of course, to cover the increased manufacturing costs and extra parts - would be extremely useful to anyone interested in hardware design. (Of course there are other kits that do this, but I think that there would be some benefit to RaspberryPi offering it as well.)

Not really practical with modern surface mount SOC components but there is always the Arduino.

There is an add-on I/O board for the Raspberry that has all the usual science class sensors and a proto area and links to the GPIO header

It probably isn't a direct replacement, but for low income children and schools serving those children in the US, it is probably a good alternative for a programming class. It will probably do better in the long run because of cost and availability to everyone.

The OLPC has a battery, case, power supply, storage, keyboard, track pad, screen. It also releases source code to the OS binaries they ship. The raspberrypi needs a £150 TV, plus lots of other accessories to do anything.

It's nice to see another player in the educational computer market though. I don't think it's fair to compare to OLPC yet, because the raspberrypi has not finished their educational version.

I think that the Raspberry Pi is actually a perfect solution for developed countries. The peripherals needed to make a Pi work can usually be scrounged for free, or picked up very cheaply. 99.9% of UK households have a suitable TV. The vast majority have at least one HDTV with HDMI inputs. Mice, keyboards, wireless adapters and SD cards can be bought at computer fairs for a couple of pounds each, or scavenged as hand-me-downs.

For the first eight years of my computing career, all my hardware came out of skips (dumpsters) or was bought used at computer fairs and flea markets. IME there's a vast glut of basic peripherals in most developed countries, simply due to the turnover of computers in offices.

Exactly used TV markets are huge in africa and asia. So cheap that if they break they just buy a new one. Like can be appreciated in this image: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/524/456/106/106456524_529.jpg

I think this could do more than the OLPC

One of the initial cristicism of the OLPC was that it wasn't what a starving child in a Somalia refugee camp needed. Their response was that it was aimed at letting kids in Peru grow up to do to S Korea and India what S Korea and India had done to the USA and Japan

Yes to a kid in an African village with no electricity an OLPC is more use - but to a kid in a CS class in Peru, a class with TVs and keyboard and kids with TVs at home this is what a Commodore 64 or Apple II was to us.

What is really better about this is that it will also be used by every other geek in the - world so it will have everything the rest of the world has. The OLPC kid will end up learning the Official Ugandan education ministry OLPC curriculum which won't be changed for 20years - they will be like Soviet CS grads in the 70s

Having something this size for home automation would be a dream. I suppose you can't to video processing and wifi with Arduino's, but with a full sized PC... would be great.

You can already buy ARM based dev kits from Nvidia, TI etc. They're much more powerful and suited towards that sort of goal (and more expensive).

Edit: for eg http://pandaboard.org/

Actually, they aren't that much more powerful (although it depends exactly how you measure).

The difference between the Panda and RasPI is pretty significant (as it should be given the price difference). Per clock the Panda is faster as it is based on the Cortex A9. It is also clocked at 1.2 ghz vs 700mhz for the RasPI.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was >2x the speed in single threaded benhmarks.

Yes, but by all accounts the GPU on the RasPI is more powerful than the Panda.

Those are very cool, but they are "development platforms". I don't want/can't design and produce my own hardware.

I want to buy a little box (around 50-100 USD would be still good), attach an USB camera, and with software make an interesting project.

In other words: Wifi and Linux (and its drivers) would make a great automation platform (having to connect to AC being the only problem left).

For example, I could put one of those in front of my water meter (http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01373/water-mete...), with a little bit of OpenCV software to parse the numbers I could have real-time water usage monitoring.

(This just reminded me of Bunnie's Chumby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby). If Chumby has died because cellphones haven't left any market to it, it could easily be repurposed to compete with Raspberry PI, it seems.

They may be called development platforms but they are really pretty similar to raspberrypi, actually. Maybe some more I/O pins. They are probably as suitable for your project as a raspberrypi, anyway.

Btw check out the Pcengine's alix, which is x86 and runs on 5 watts or so. Or the Genesi Efika, which is arm based

I actually DO use an alix for home automation, btw. It runs plain unmolested ubuntu.

Nice! I'll just leave some links in case anyone wants to see what its like:

http://www.wifiproducts.com.au/wifi-mikrotik-webstore/ALIX_C...

http://www.wifiproducts.com.au/wifi-mikrotik-webstore/ALIX_2...

these folks sell them for a fair bit less: http://myworld.ebay.com/pandorashope/?_trksid=p4340.l2559

this is where i got mine, anwyay

also check out the beagleboard-xM: http://beagleboard.org/

It's the enabling technology aspect. A small cheap machine with PC class power, video, networking and Linux

Imagine if instead of spending $1Bn on an app to make photos worse - Facebook had given away one of these to every household in America and bundled an app that constantly streams your Facebook experience on your TV.

That would have wiped out the TV networks overnight.

The death of the current paradigm is in physical devices, haptics, ergonomics. This is definitely an enabling technology for this.

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