Raspberry Pi production grows, $35 Linux computer now available in bulk | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi production grows, $35 Linux computer now available in bulk

arstechnica.com

103 pointsshawndumas64 comments

For those who are interested, there's a new Stack Exchange site for Raspberry Pi developers and users: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com

Some example questions:

"How do I run the Raspberry Pi on Solar Power?" http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/86

"How can I extend the life of my SD card?" http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/169

"How do I install Google Chrome?" http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/374

I'm torn at hearing about this because although it seems a logical move, the RPi official site has its own support/tech forums (and Wiki), so do Farnell (Element 14) and adding another technical resources site is going to fragment the support collective even more.

I find the SE format much easier to read and find the information I want.

Odd choice. My reputation doesn't carry over from the main stackexchange.com site. I tried to be a good citizen and upvote some helpful answers that were below less helpful answers, but was rebuffed.

If you have 200 reputation on any site in the network, you should be granted a +100 bonus when you create an account on a new site. That's enough to let you vote and comment, but not quite enough to downvote.

Imagine all the cool stuff you could do with a box of these... yet a huge chunk of the things I keep coming back to are various nefarious or gray area uses, where these are cheap enough to be effectively disposable:

* Put them in cheap weatherproof housing, with cheap storage, and place them all over as communication and file sharing hubs. Combine with meshing (like the commotion project) and use them in arab spring situations. Essentially darknet building.

* Put it in your coffee shop with ettercap running and mitm everyone. So what if the thing is found - presumably you can get another with proceeds.

* Similarly put it anywhere you need/want a gateway that doesn't look like a gateway. Good wifi at some coffee shop? Put your box there, and now you have device to do whatever from, and you can be 1000 miles away. No need to break anything. Total time saver. Want to get around firewall crap? Just have this guy in the wiring closet opening a "reverse shell" out (probably to the afore-mentioned gateway :) ).

* (not nefarious or grey at all) - cheap video player/presentation player. It has hdmi out, so you can just send it a video feed/remote desktop feed via wifi and not worry about cables/connectors/drivers that are still an issue in 2012.

The thing that sets the Pi apart for me is that is actually has some I/O broken out right on the board, which makes it much more suitable for things like robotics and automation. The things you mention can be done better with different hardware imho.

Pi doesn't have Wi-Fi, if you want to do ad-hoc Wi-Fi stuff I would suggest you get a cheap Linux-based router. If you want a video player, you can get cheap Android-based ones for ~50 bucks (i.e. http://www.dealextreme.com/p/mini-android-4-0-network-media-...).

If only it had VGA output - there are so many incredibly cheap old LCD monitors on eBay. You could setup a huge number of very cheap terminals anywhere.

As lots of people have pointed out it can't do VGA directly. (You could use a USB video adapter but I digress). The number of 'cheap' HDMI video monitors out there is pretty astonishing too. You can do HDMI->DVI (this is just a plug change not a signaling change) and use many of those same monitors.

The challenge of course is that programming the video is dependent on getting support from Broadcom. One thing that has really pissed me off at them is I've got an InPulse watch that I can't get 64 bit Broadcom drivers for Win7 to use their SDK, how sucky is that? So getting support for their video blob in the RpI is probably not going to fly either.

Are you serious? VGA is a terrible analog standard that would've made the video output of this device useless.

Having HDMI means any kid can plug it straight into the family television without any problems, or they can always get a new, cheap monitor for well under $100 if they shop around.

It also doesn't preclude the Pi from being used to drive large displays for commercial applications or for classroom presentations.

Since I'm not made of money, my only display device with HDMI is a Google TV that I got for free (won it) a couple of years ago. If they wanted it to work with "the family television without any problems", they could have added composite video out.

Per http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs, it does have composite video out.

Just be sure your cheap old LCD monitor has DVI input for the HDMI-DVI cable! Maybe not quite as cheap, but still do-able.

I see plenty that do: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Monitors-Projectors-Accs-/162497/i.h...

You can always add a small amount to the cost and get hdmi-vga cables.

There are none. You need a $40 (checked at monoprice) converter that's almost as big as the Pi.

DVI/VGA only works if the GPU puts out VGA in the first place - the VGA signal just happens to be present in the same cable.

Hmm.. you're probably right. But HDMI/DVI adapters work, as do DVI/VGA, why can't they be combined?

DVI has additional pins for carrying an analog signal, but they don't have to be used to transmit the digital one. The simple DVI-VGA adapters are merely shape changers, wiring the relevant pins from the DVI side to the VGA side.

DVI can carry both analog (VGA-compatible) and digital (HDMI-compatible) signals on the same cable. HDMI is digital-only, and VGA is analog-only.

I like the first one. Think anonymous dropboxes. You don't need much storage; hopefully (and if someone has the moolah) put 256GB of SSD (so it doesn't use much power); power it with a solar charger and hide in a tree or in some out-of-the-way place. Slap a webserver on it, and let people upload/download content...

None of these are in any way related to what the Pi was allegedly designed for, recreating the learning experience of the BBC Micro in the early 80s.

I can assure you, even if you buy well and minimize it, there is still need to play with drivers to get wifi working. (It doesn't have on board wifi, not sure if you know that from your post). I mean, mine was as simple as a single modprobe, but that's because I was using raspbian and not the stock image or the XBMC builds.

Hrm, I was under the impression it had built-in wifi, but, as far as firmware/software, almost all of the usages in my list would probably be done by the type of person (e.g. me) who would re-image the boot sd card with his own distro anyway, so drivers would be an issue for the first image, but the nth (assuming the same wifi dongle) would be 0 extra cost.

I'm using the Arch image and a ZyXEL NWD2105. Worked with absolutely no problems OOTB - well after installing the wireless_tools package. Didn't even need an external powered USB hub.

I use the Asus 330GE "personal hotspot" device to convert my wifi to wired ethernet.

Ironically, put DD-WRT on the Asus 330GE and you have a device that is very roughly equivalent to the RasberryPi (excluding the Pi's graphics abilities)

I'm confused. Isn't the B model equipped with onboard WiFi?

Ethernet, not WiFi. None of the models have wireless. A wireless module costs nearly as much as the entire board in parts.

Weird. I'd been assuming it had WiFi...been a while since I'd read the specs. That makes it much less useful, IMHO, though I still like the low power nature of the device. But you can get many more powerful android devices for about $70 that have WiFi, more ram, multiple cores, and more expansion options. Not to say I won't buy one, just that I won't buy a bunch of them, since WiFi is absolutely vital for the home automation projects I had in mind.

It has USB, so you can stick a small USB wifi device on it.

That doesn't make sense to me, I mean they can sell usb wifi dongles for less than $10, presumably profitably, so I would presume they could add wifi to the RP board for pretty cheap. What am I missing?

Probably that they're still trying to make it under $35 and get it out the door. Keep in mind that this is technically their first model, they probably wanted to keep things simple for a first release.

You can easily add wifi using this $10 dongle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005CLMJLU (according to the rpi forums, it works out of the box with current kernels)

Wouldn't they also have to submit it for regulatory approval if they included wifi?

ethernet is relatively stable, whereas new wireless protocols and upgrades come out all the time. I would rather have wireless through usb or as a component of a daughterboard via the onboard bus, than soldered onto the board.

>ethernet is relatively stable, whereas new wireless protocols and upgrades come out all the time

I can't really agree with this line of thought:

802.11a - 1999 (5GHz)

802.11b - 1999 (2.4GHz)

802.11g - 2003 (2.4GHz)

802.11n - 2009 (2.4GHz + 5GHz)

802.11ac - 2012 (5GHz)

The only new standard on the immediate horizon is 802.11ac, and that's targeted strictly at the 5GHz band. Additionally, all the 2.4GHz stuff is backwards compatible all the way back to the old 802.11b standard.

Things certainly change, but it's more in the range of once every 4-5 years than it is all the time. There are good reasons not to include wifi on-board on the pi, but I don't see that as being one of them.

Getting CE/FCC approval for wifi is expensive and time consuming.

It also normally requires you to either get emmisions tests for the complete system or you can use a separate WIFI module - which is why most laptops have wifi on mini-pci cards.

Of course if you want to make a no-name $5 usb wifi dongle and just print CE on it that's a lot cheaper.

Nope, Model B has an Ethernet jack but no wifi.

The Pi has been a great show in the perils of poor supply chain management. I woke up early on release day to try and get one, failed, continued to fail for quite a while, and never ordered one.

It would cost me, in the UK, £29.50, and take '5 weeks'. For £39, and a little quicker, i can get the all-winner a10 based MK802, which has;

    * a much more powerful 1Ghz+ A8 processor
    * a much more powerful GPU (mali 400)
    * much more memory (1GB vs 256MB)
    * wifi
    * a case

The pi surely has it's niche still (gpio, community), and to be fair to the crew, their aims have always been separate from ours-- aimed at education and not hackers. And it did start all this. But IMO, at least until they can get the model A out at lower cost, there is little attractive about it today for someone looking for a tiny arm computer.

Interestingly, if they had used kickstarter (or just taken pre-orders) they would have been able to get manufacturing off at 100K+ quantities, and wouldn't have had these problems.

The MK802 looks interesting. But in the USA, it's showing as $99 versus the Raspberry Pi's $35.

https://www.miniand.com/

My main interest in the Pi is that it represents a newish class of computing devices which are cheap enough to treat as ad-hoc embedded computers. The MK802 looks interesting, but it doesn't seem to fall into that category. Even the Pi is still towards the high end of what I'm hoping to see.

$35 is just the headline price, there is shipping on top of that (taxes?). MK802 shipped @ $60[1]. So is +$20 worth that? (plus, the wait was 12 weeks when i checked a us retailer for pi)

1. http://ipadalternative.com/101-mini-pocket-pc-android-linux-... no doubt elsewhere + ebay, too.

E: sorry, i quoted the 512MB ram version's price, can't edit earlier post. still twice rPi.

Several Kickstarters have badly struggled to meet their phenomenal demand - see the comments for those waiting for Elevation Docks: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hop/elevation-dock-the-b...

They are UK based, so kickstarter isn't necessarily an option.

Unfortunately I'm rather disappointed with regard to the Raspberry Foundation living up to its obligations. They had made a deal with Nokia for a "Qt on Pi" device program that would get 400 units into the hands of Qt developers, and these were supposed to be among the first to go out:

http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/11/24/qt-5-with-rasberry-pi-a-...

However, they never managed to get the expected page up where one would redeem the coupon code. Eventually an email-based way was put in place, but to this day, nobody in the programme has received their Pi.

Yes, this is a "didn't get free stuff" whine, but still, they promised and never delivered.

Not focusing more on software is, in my opinion, one of the biggest mistake they made so far. They should have increased the price a little bit and at the least sponsored some driver development.

Nokia did lay off most or all of the Qt developers between then and now...

When these first came out I was gagging for one, but since then the enthusiasm I had has been slowly dwindling.

I wonder how many others are like me, and how much more they might have sold had they waited to have a bit more stock at launch.

(I'm not taking anything away from the product or the team, just an observation/question on launch strategies.)

Huge hype then huge wait times have that effect. I know with Guild Wars 2, I was hyped beyond belief... two years ago. I then played the betas this spring/summer and thought "yeah, this is cool. I guess."

Extreme hype wears off quick, and needs to be capitalized upon immediately. I can already feel the same thing happening with the Microsoft Surface.

I do know that if I could have bought 10 RPis in March, I would have. Last week I paid for my preorder of one and feel thats probably enough.

Thanks for taking the risk to share your detailed anecdotal agreement with the OP, even though apparently someone felt it was worth downvoting.

I feel similar to you. The bungled launch and difficult distributer made my interest evaporate.

Maybe they are easier to get if you live in the UK or Commonwealth.

Soon there will be full Linux support for ARM and we will see lots of SoC boards.

I have exactly the same feeling. I wanted to order at least 2 RPi during the launch (one for me and one for my wife), but now, I didn't even care when Farnell and the other distributor contacted me that they can send it to me as soon as I pay. BTW. I always thought that the published price is with taxes already and now I see that I have to pay 23% VAT on top of the $35 device (+ shipping, but that's obvious). So it's a real pain. Here in Europe prices shown are most of the time with taxes included (not counting the huge distributors selling only to companies)

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for the one I ordered from RS on May 24th. Never heard from RS again. Dropped an email and got no answer. I do imagine all the cool stuff I could do if I could only grab a box full of these at a reasonable price here in Brazil, but for now it is just imagination.

I ordered mine on May 9 from Farnell, and received it just today. It's the same with some friends who ordered one.

I ordered mine the first day the sites came back up after their crash. I just last week got an email saying it was time to order, and apparently it takes 12 weeks to ship from the UK to the US east coast. If they can't fulfill a single order, how can they fulfill bulk orders?

I'm in New Zealand, and ordered mine about the same time as you (NZD $55). The ETA when I ordered was 8-9 weeks, and it's been 3-4 already. Much like you, I haven't heard anything from RS in the meantime, which is a bit disappointing; a weekly or by-weekly update just to let me know what stage of production my orders at would be great, even just to know they are aware of it.

Kind of annoyed that I held off my order for a couple weeks after I got the notification. In the two weeks I waited from the time I got my notification to when I ordered the backlog went from 6 weeks to 9 weeks. If i'd ordered earlier i'd probably have my Pi by now.

Might order a second one from Farnell, but I hear they're still pretty backed up too.

A day after the initial launch of the Raspi, I ordered two (one from RS and one from Farnell). The Farnell one arrived about 4 weeks ago and the RS one arrived about two weeks ago. I'm in France and ordered via the UK sites in both cases.

P.S. RS packaging wins - it had a cute Raspi logo sticker on it :)

I ordered mine in March and got it last week. So yeah, sit tight. It sounds like wait times are speeding up a bit though.

I'm in the US. Still waiting for mine too.

I would rather pay more for better hardware support. Their are several problems with inability to provide enough power. Accessories won't work out of box, etc.

I wonder if components and build price has lowered since february; enough so they could drop the price a bit lower. Or maybe make board, psu, wifi dongle (you'd buy them anyway) kits for ~40$.

what's the point when delivery time is still approx ~ 10 weeks+. I rather buy it on eBay and get it in the next few days.

maybe that's a business opportunity... order 1000, then sell on ebay for a markup.

If they ramped up production as advertised, that won't fly.

Half that through Farnell instead of RS.

if they just had 1 gig, this would be great for server environments

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