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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully they will move to the ARMv7 archicture with the next-generation Raspeberry Pi chip. ARM11 which is based on the ARMv6 architecture is so old, and many popular apps don't want to support it anymore.

Adobe didn't want to support it with Flash, Google won't support it with Chrome for Android (even on ICS), Mozilla didn't want to support it initially, but eventually changed their mind probably because they are desperate for market share on Android. Canonical doesn't want to support it in Ubuntu as well. So yeah, I'm hoping for a Cortex A7 or at least a Cortex A5 to replace the ARM11 CPU in the 2.0 version.

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And I want wifi, and a built in 8GB flash and at least 2GB of ram and make the board smaller and cheaper (or even free) and include a touch screen and dual ethernet and a camera, and firewire and thunderbolt and a floppy drive and a battery and gps, and more blinky leds and an extra Alpha co-processor so I can run my favorite version of WindowsNT and a scsi port so I can connect my scanner. I am at least glad they left off the jazz drive, who needs that anymore!

Seriously it is $35. Someone is going to take it give it a case and a SD card that has 1 single application/purpose and do something amazing with it and people will eat it up. This device isn't about what old thing you can run, but about what crazy NEW things can be done.

It is insulting that you would even bring up Adobe in this as they have for all intents and purposes killed flash and it will never appear on this device.

Start thinking about how to exploit what the device gives you. The feature of this device is that it is dirt f*n cheap. A $3000 computer you want to keep working for months/years, but at $25 who cares if it dies and you have to buy another. Rather than sharing USB sticks you share your Pi. Put them in colorful cases and kids will trade them at school. Mount them in locations where water damage is very possible and just replace it when it dies. Give it a big battery and _bury_ it in your yard. Drop it in the ocean and have it transmit until it is crushed for amusement. Buy four of them and make some sort of game. Etc

Edit how cheap can you get a screen for this?

That's kind of where I see it.

An Arduino Uno costs $30, has 2KB of RAM, and runs at 16 MHz.

The Raspberry Pi costs $35, has 256 MB of RAM, and runs at 700 MHz. It also has two USB ports, ethernet, HDMI, composite video, a great GPU, SD card, and more.

You only get 8 GPIO pins, but you also have I2C and SPI. Plus they were developing a board to help with that.

There are quite a few projects you might want to do that would take quite a bit more horsepower than an Arduino, but a Raspberry Pi would do great for. Think of using something like a Raspberry Pi with a serial breakout board for running a Reprap or Makerbot. Enough power to run the machine and provide an amazing 3D GUI of the object being printed during the process.

It still has less IO than a Beaglebone, but it also costs 1/3rd the price.

I don't think many people will be using the Rasperry Pi to replace netbooks or most desktops, but I see a ton of hobbyist uses.

> Drop it in the ocean and have it transmit until it is crushed for amusement.

I now have a new hobby.

You won't get very far on radio waves so you best look up torpedo wire or something around the .1mm diameter range to tether to the pi to get a signal.

edit: farnell do 19300ft of 38awg .. that should do the trick.

Has the point that this machine is meant as a ubiquitous children's "learn to program" environment escaped everybody? It may offer cool alternative uses, but that's not its raison d'être. It's supposed to something kids can muck about with without screwing up the family computer so that there will be the same pool of kids to draw from going forward as there were with the BBC Micro (or the Timex/Sinclair machines) in play. Scratch is the killer app for the platform, not Flash or even a web browser.

+1, Really not sure why these reviewers are going on about its rendering capabilities, its quite adequate for learning python or C++ on and totally overkill for any embedded projects (Think Arduino on steroids).

Once some optimisation work is done I think people will be amazed by what it can do.

I can picture myself starting a Raspberry Pithon hacking club. :)

Also: I want to write a port/clone of Elite, in Python, that runs on the Raspberry Pi. A tribute to Braben. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if he's already done something like that himself, as a "test" of the system.

I agree. A lot of the points in this review are simply irrelevant. They're talking about support for HDMI and other features not being available in default Debian distributions, the abililty to render Quake 3 (seriously), and other ridiculous comments.

If you're a hacker/tinkerer/kid learning, the default distribution isn't likely all you'll be using anyway. And if you're buying the Raspberry Pi to try to get a cheap gaming system, you've completely missed the point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore#VideoCore_ICs are comparible chips. Presumably there Broadcom will sell versions of the beefier ones with the 3G turned off.

It will surely come eventually, but only when it fits with their goals. Price is a huge constraint on the project, so it will mostly depend on the forward march of Progress bringing down prices of comparable chips with ARM11 cores.

Flash I could care less about these days, and surely most things where source is available can be tweaked and compiled for arm6?

Also, midori has been tested and seems fine apparently.

Besides, why, unless you had no other option, would you be using this as a normal desktop? Surely it is there to tinker with and build cool stuff? The fact that it can run a linux desktop is impressive, but surely that is more of a demonstration of abilities, rather than the main use for the thing.

I'd be far more interested in seeing what new classes of devices can be built with one of these as the core, than in using one for web browsing, although I like the fact it can be used for that in a pinch.

One of the first things I am likely to do with one of these is to try mucking about with RISCOS, just for old times sake. I suspect that given that it runs so close to the metal, you could make some extremely low latency devices that way.

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