Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

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/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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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