Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy

engadget.com

17 pointssuprgeek25 comments

I'm not particularly impressed. The Pi isn't a budget computer, it's not for watching Nyan Cat or listening to podcasts, it's a computer sandboxing tool. Yes, it has teething problems but it's been designed on a minuscule budget, had little time in the wild to actually gain any traction and most definitely has not had the time required to mature the supported software. This review is targeting all the wrong things and glossing over what the Pi is actually meant for.

As a media centre or recreational tool, it's useless, but as an educational tool it's not to be rubbished. For $35 a go, I'm willing to put up with a lack of Youtube.

Agreed, and I imagine it will not be long until a RPi is running home built UAV's (for example).

And doing stuff like that is going to make stuff like IT/Engineering education a hell of a lot more fun, rewarding and accessible.

I like to think of the RPi as an arduino that can run opencv. Arduinos are nice little devices for getting started in the electronics world, but when you need to do real work, it's nice that the RPi is essentially the same price.

It's a good way of putting it. Arduinos are probably more directly rewarding and usable (if you're an Engadget reporter anyway), but if I was setting up an under 16's Comp Sci class, It'd have to be the Pi, just 'cause it's more.. educational?

The GPIO pins of the RPi can act as the same digital/analog pins that your arduino has, but if you use the arduino, you're confined to using their processing language to write code.

A typical project for the arduino might be to control a few simple servo motors to drive a small vehicle. Your comp sci class can now teach in python, and have python control the GPIO pins to drive the vehicle.

I think kids would be a lot more excited to learn how to program after seeing how a small $35 device can be used to control a car remotely.

Well put. I'm no kid, and it excites me! I think it's important we don't overlook the levelling effect stuff like this has, the same way Gutenberg took books to the masses, things like this take the ability to create with technology to the masses. It's not quite the same level of revolutionary, but it's still remarkable.

Quite so! And whereas the Arduino has flash and ram measured in a handful of kb the Raspberry Pi has half a gig of ram onboard and supports SD cards which run at less than a dollar per gig, and runs linux of course. If you want to run Python or Erlang or host a local Postresql server on your tiny little embedded system you can do so easily with Raspberry Pi. The sorts of projects that are going to come out of this thing are going to be incredible.

They're also cheap enough to make distributed computing more immediately viable in those projects. A few of these chained up could probably do quite a variety of complicated tasks. I'd bet you could make stuff like self-driving cars a lot cheaper and efficient on the computing side.

That's an interesting point. With a $35 computer of those capabilities it's definitely a lot more doable to just develop out each hardware component to have a computer attached to it. You can run MongoDB or Couch or well as Node.js and have a services oriented architecture with high-level APIs between all your hardware components.

Exactly. Each device is potentially a self-contained unit of a whole, and things tend to get a damn sight more efficient if each is exclusively host to a specific tool, with the environment exclusively designed to match that specific tool. I do wonder just how efficient a cluster of Pis running a typical, but refactored for Pis, LAMP stack would be in comparison to a typical LAMP setup on a comparable server.

  because apparently it's the lack of time spent punching
  arcane commands into a terminal that has killed interest
  in computer science

Uh, actually. I think that this review is well off, and it really shows here. The command line is simple. Everybody I know learned to program by writing command-line programs. I mean, seriously, int main(){printf("hello world");}. That's incredible for education. Review it as a media center or a browser and you will be disappointed.

I sort of agree and disagree with you on the accessibility of the command line, it's definitely a lot less difficult that it was a decade ago, what with the proliferation of the internet and therefore stuff like StackOverflow, but it's still notably daunting and somewhat steep on the learning curve. Still, stuff like this is how we make it easier and more accessible.

The reviewer probably isn't aware of the tech bubble too. All the madness that is facebook & instagram, were fueled by arcane commands in a terminal. I remember from the first bubble that made computer science so hot, we had history majors willing to switch to CS to learn these arcane commands.

The command line is simple.

For certain definitions of "simple" :-)

I'm one of the people who learned of a simple command line (although on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum - didn't have access to nice little unix boxes in my day).

And of course it's a fine and good way to learn how to program.

That said - I've seen a few teens take a different route. They got into MySpace. They started wanted to "tweak" things. That got them into HTML/CSS. That got them into JavaScript. That got them into coding.

Or I've seen people start with hypercard back when hypercard was the biz.

Or I've seen people start with Director (and later Flash) and move on from there.

The other thing I saw several times back in the day when I taught development to non-dev folk was that some folk were really put off by the command line. I remember we had a course that I taught that was built around an GUI IDEish environment where folk were building a little SHRDLU type app. At the same time a subset of the course were on a "beginners C" course that was all command line driven. The C course was good and well taught - but some folk hated it, but made superb progress on the IDEish course. It was freaky to see the same people spend hours ranting about finding files and overstepping array bounds by one on one course, while successfully building basic NLP apps on another :-)

Now - I like the RasPi. It's a cute box. But I'm unconvinced that it's going to make any significant difference in the number or kind of young folk who go play with development tools. I can't really picture anybody (child or parent) purchasing one of these who wouldn't already be the type to poke at a home Linux box or PC in a developerish way.

With the way that cheap PCs get recycled is the price point going to be enough? It's great for hobbyist hackers - but they were already hobbyist hackers :-)

Well the command line is simple, however it looks daunting at first. Even among non-programmers (like my wife); after they managed to get over their initial fear of 'learning all those difficult commands' and such, they start to loath GUIs for a lot of things.

Well the command line is simple, however it looks daunting at first

As I said - for certain definitions of "simple". For example

* Looks "daunting at first" means it doesn't meet simple if you're talking about approachability or initial ease of use

* Command lines if fantastic for many operations (piping is wonderful in Unix land, moving a stack of files based on a regex, etc. - all much quicker to do in command line land once you know what you're doing). So it meets simple for "easy when you know how".

* Selecting and moving a set of randomly named files - probably slower than with a GUI. (Doesn't meet "simple" for tasks where you can't leverage the command line advantages much).

* I really miss the pre-OS X Finder when I could have a single physical layout for my files and WIP. Made me stupidly productive.... even when I was just using my Mac as a chubby-client to my Linux box).

I loath GUIs for some tasks. Love 'em for others. s/GUI/command-line/ and the same applies :-)

It's just using words like "simple" without qualifiers raises my UX hackles (which are equally raised when GUI fans use words like "intuitive"). It's more nuanced than that.

All true. I considered mentioning Excel, GUI builders, HTML, and flash (I'm too young to remember hypercard) but couldn't fit it into the post without rambling. That said, nearly everybody ends up at the command line eventually. Javascript error console, learning a second language, building a daemon or a library, what have you. Having started on GUI builders myself and stalled until I moved to the command line, I think that other paradigms are good for catching new programmers' attention, but the command line is where you really learn what's going on, and you have a slightly better time if you start out there.

  (child or parent)

The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis.

Hmm... I guess that makes sense. I'm probably thinking about it from the UK perspective where I don't think it'll have that same impact. At $35 per-student still seems like an awful lot of cash per-student to me if the rants teacher friends give me about getting current text books, etc. are anything to go by.

Let me put it another way. I think there are a bunch of folk who remember getting into development because of small, cheap computers with a simple command line interface. They look around today and don't see those machines, and think that adding them back will produce an influx of new developers.

But the world is different now. Back then computers were "new". Back then people were buying those boxes as "the home computer". For games and word processing and finance as well as "programming" (in 99% of cases they were never used for writing or financials - but they were sold that way :-) I'm going to be surprised if the raspi has anything like the impact that the early Sinclair computers had in the UK for example.

I still hope I'll be surprised though :-)

The community for RPi is small mostly because it's impossible to get one. They really need to ramp up manufacturing to get the device into more hands. I ordered one 5 weeks ago from element14 but it looks like I'll still have to wait another month or two to get mine.

I like how it said this

    In fact, simply launching Engadget was enough to pin the CPU and
    bring the OS to a standstill for at least a few minutes.

with no apparent irony or shame. I mean, some might take that as a sign that their website could benefit from some attention.

I thought the exact same thing. Engadget is a blog, it ought to be lightweight.

For newbies, here's a guide i uploaded yesterday:

http://moishtech.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/setup-and-run-asteri...

I already have Asterisk/FreePBX running on my Pi and had setup an RPi Wiki page ready for some notes, but work was curtailed due to hospitalization so would you consider popping in some something, or a link, from your excellent guide. I was just working on getting DAHDI going to support conferencing and see how the board coped with that - did you get that far?

Sure no problem, not familiar with the RPi Wiki, drop me an email at tapajob at gmail dot com with the details.

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