Raspberry Pi

I don't know if anyone is interested or has been following the development of the Raspberry Pi credit card $25 'PC' but I thought I would chuck in a link as it may be of interest of some

That does look pretty cool, and the fact David Braben is involved is even better. I've been toying with the idea of getting a beagleboard for messing around with. But the price of this thing makes it too tempting to pass up.

It does strike me that this thing is very much no huge breakthrough (unless there's something I've missed going on with some special software sauce they are making available)... I mean, yes it's nice that they are selling it at cost price but...

What makes this really different from the Beagleboard?

In essence, both are basically marketing boards for the chip vendor; usually these are much more expensive - $300+ - as they are built in low volume and come with some measure of support as they're intended to help a commercial customer make their own board.

The Beagleboard was the first really decently priced system, which was obviously the result of some apps engineer getting permission to "give this a shot with the hobbyists". The Pi is significantly lower spec than the Beagleboard, and being funded and made by people with no profit requirements, hence it's cheaper, but it's the same thing - barebones uncased computing which won't really appeal to many as it stands.

If they put it in a box and sold it with a mains power supply, boot media, and a cheap USB wifi stick (and did the necessary approvals to make it saleable as an end user product), but charged - say - $50, I think it'd be a lot more interesting. As it is, I suppose they are going to rely on others making boxes for it so that the less hardcore geeks will feel comfortable.

It's a sixth the cost.

Real HDMI output, HD video decoding/playback. $25.

I kind of think that they've missed "their own" point with it.

Their official line is that it's a educational board that is going to go into schools and recreate the times when kids could learn to do more than just use word or surf the internet, they have people like David Braben "evangelising" it saying it could help develop the next set of "Elite" (the game) programmers.

I know times have moved on significantly, but the appeal of computers like the BBC (and its peers) were that they were essentially very basic, you had total control over the hardware and the entire system was documented.

What they've managed to achieve here is a board that runs linux with a CPU that is heavily protected by NDA's and therefore has plenty of "binary only" bits.

I like it for what is it, a cheap board that runs linux and has HDMI.

I don't like it for what it isn't, an educational tool to teach the fundamentals of computing. If they wanted to do that, they should have just recreated the BBC model B and then give this generation of "computer users" a real taste of how computers really work.

I grew up in that era, typing in programs from computer magazines and learning many skills that are sorely missed from todays generation of comp. si graduates, certainly in the UK where you pretty much guarantee that a comp. sic graduate won't be able to program). It's because of doing such low level stuff early on that I just love doing embedded stuff, because it uses all those skills that I picked up way back - and it's probably the reason that I dislike for doing "PC" software gets worse!

Let's face it, most of these will get snapped up by geeks and won't be landing in your local school. Do "IT" teachers even have the skill to do anything with these? I think not.

I think the Pi people are planning on a boxed version later.

I guess I thought the beagleboard (which was definitely $99 for a while when it launched 2+ years back) had HDMI; turns out it was DVI-D. Hard-macro blocks for video encode/decode are nice, even though the drivers are probably binary only.

I suppose I'm being a bit harsh on the main selling point being the price, maybe that makes the world of difference. I can see TI not liking the idea of Broadcom winning a hearts & minds contest and you may suddenly see the Beagleboard - or a variant - getting super cheap, but with a decent CPU architecture vs a 4 years out of date ARM11.

Still, consumers win in that case!