Raspberry PI $25 PC

Doge

Tallon wrote: »

Ah, I perfectly understand that.. But what if the had a model C? Just for the fanboys

Well then they would have to move away from the Broadcom BCM2835, and use a chip that would offer more RAM.

Nobody except Broadcom knows if an incarnation of the BCM2835 exists with more RAM.

I think a private company would be best suited to deliver a higher spec'd device with a similar form factor.

That demand is not what the charity is catering for, and should never cater for it imo.

Don't worry though, I'm predicting an explosion of these sized devices in the next few years.

Check out the Cubox which is already on sale, (at a much higher price) and keep an eye on Rhombus Tech who are proposing to make a more powerful device than the Rpi, but with a similar price.

The more companies that pick up this market, the more competition there will be to drive down prices.

Khannie

So what are you all going to use them for once they're out?

I'm half thinking of building a system that lets me control the house heating from my phone. You could issue a command wirelessly over ssh once you were on a LAN fairly handy (like set an on / off time, turn on for x minutes, that kind of thing). That's if that gertboard works out to be easy enough to use. If you had the proper port forwarding set up it would allow you to turn on the heating on your way home (this occurred to me while on the way home from a weekend away when I was walking in the door at 12.30 into a bleedin' ice box). You could make all sorts of smart additions to your house.

There's a lad who bought one of the beta boards answering loads of questions over on reddit. Link.

Doge

Media Centre/wireless print server/wireless NAS are going to be my practical uses anyways.
Will also use it to learn linux me thinks.

Some guy has created a Virtual Box VM specifically for emulating the Raspberry Pi:

http://russelldavis.org/2011/09/10/virtualbox-vm-for-raspberrypi-development/#comment-340

You can download it from the torrent links on that page.

Khannie

Mobile but....I think it will make a poor nas. Will explain more later.

Like the print server idea.

Doge

Khannie wrote: »

Mobile but....I think it will make a poor nas. Will explain more later.

Like the print server idea.

I used the term NAS as lazy as possible there.

Just want to use it to share files from an external hard drive on my network, nothing fancy.

Khannie

Yep and in general linux is really well suited to that. I've been doing it for about 4 years now with no trouble whatsoever. The problem with the pi will be its lack of processing power. Typically USB devices suck the life out of a processor. It might be ok for streaming a single movie but an equivalent device with a SATA connected hard drive would be capable of much more. USB is just a bit of a dog for whatever reason.

Might be worth asking yer man on reddit what it's like.

massy086

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NR57ELY28s

Khannie

That's very nice. Very nice looking indeed.

I wonder what it would be like with a dvb-s receiver for some freesat + media centre over wifi + NFS. Not sure the processor would be up to decoding the mpeg2 of the lowdef stations.

I already have a HTPC in the house that acts as a media server for other boxes in the house so that could be brilliant if coupled with a remote of some sort.

duffman85

Raspberry Pi XBMC Distro announced

http://www.stmlabs.com/2012/01/30/raspbmc-the-xbmc-distribution-for-raspberrypi/

Features include:

• Custom Linux distribution with minimalised kernel.
• Auto-updating
• UI installers for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X to allow installation onto a removable device
• PVR / AirTunes / AirPlay / Spotify integration
• Same stability and support as the Crystalbuntu Linux distribution
• Expansive capabilities allowing the installation of a desktop and web browser
• AFP, NFS and SMB file sharing
• Configuration utility allowing installation of custom nightlies, audio configuration, update management,
• Server mode – allows MySQL database hosting and Thumbnail sharing for XBMC multiseat systems.
• 1080p decoding

It will be available from www.raspbmc.com once the website goes live.

@Khannie ->They won't be shipping with MPEG2 as the licensing cost is too great, $2.50 per board
From this Post : http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592

Raspberry Pi Blog wrote:

Codecs

Two licensed codecs will be provided at launch, MPEG4 and h.264. Codec licences have quite an impact of the cost of the device which is why there are only two at this stage. There are non-licensed Codecs such at MPEG2, VC1 etc, but for the moment they will not be accelerated by the GPU.

Dom adds: As an aside, the GPU can hardware decode H264, MPEG1/2/4, VC1, AVS, MJPG at 1080p30. It can software (but still vector accelerated) decode VP6, VP7, VP8, RV, Theora, WMV9 at DVD resolutions. We are restricted due to licensing what we can support. We should be able to support VP8, MJPG and Theora, as I believe they are license free.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these!

Khannie

Nice. I wish they'd give some kind of update on an expected release date. It's starting to do my noodle in a bit at this stage.

Doge

Khannie wrote: »

Nice. I wish they'd give some kind of update on an expected release date. It's starting to do my noodle in a bit at this stage.

Nah...

Stealth launch FTW!

It would certainly improve my chances of getting my hands on one!

Khannie

I'd suggest registering in the online store in advance - www.raspberrypi.com. Could save you precious seconds.

shizz

Khannie wrote: »

I'd suggest registering in the online store in advance - www.raspberrypi.com. Could save you precious seconds.

Great idea man. its .org though and your link is broken. Found my way though.

Any update on when we can get one?

Khannie

No, the .com site is where they'll be selling them from so that's where you need to sign up to. The .org site is where they'll announce it though.

So sick of waiting.

Tallon

Khannie wrote: »

No, the .com site is where they'll be selling them from so that's where you need to sign up to. The .org site is where they'll announce it though.

So sick of waiting.

Me too.. Actually cannot wait... Is there even a rough time frame?

duffman85

From their twitter page: http://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi

Raspberry Pi wrote:

@hawkz We'll be using the mailing list to let people know in advance when release is.
2 Feb via web

Once they announce the date, we'll all be wearing out the F5 key on the keyboard. I think I saw it mentioned in their tweets that they haven't got the boards back from China yet, so release could be a few weeks away - possibly end of Feb.

shizz

Khannie wrote: »

No, the .com site is where they'll be selling them from so that's where you need to sign up to. The .org site is where they'll announce it though.

So sick of waiting.

Yeah your right. hmmm although when I put rasberrypi.com in the web browser it automagically changes it to .org. Strange.

Doge

Big update on this folks...

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/615

Khannie

Well....at least there's a date. I can wait 3 more weeks 'til it's in my hands.

Doge

Khannie wrote: »

Well....at least there's a date. I can wait 3 more weeks 'til it's in my hands.

I'd be willing to bet you could wait 3 months more if it was held back.

Because you're simply a slave to the fact that there's no other alternative!

Khannie

Yep. You bet your ass I would wait 3 months. I think this is the coolest little piece of technology to hit the shelves in years. €20 computer!

Realistically I don't think they'll start volume shipping until April / May and I'm guessing all they really want is to have them in schools with the bugs ironed out and a nice distro ready for September.

Mr Benevolent

I'm going to wait 'til they come in a case, I'd probably break it otherwise.

Tallon

That will be a while I'd imagine!

I have a few ideas in mind for different cases.......

windingo

Whats the latest with these motherboards? Are they available? What are they capable of?

Dublin_Gunner

windingo wrote: »

Whats the latest with these motherboards? Are they available? What are they capable of?

Here's a good article / interview, which gives a little insight. I'd also urge you to read this thread

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/pcs/2012/01/26/raspberry-pi-modders-dream-machine/1

Doge

So who else is predicting a load of disappointed buyers ranting on the Pi forums,
for expecting a 256MB RAM device to magically be the PC of their dreams?

We'll definitely have to manage our expectations, I can see browsing on the device to be a bit painful for multi-tabbed sessions.

But for all the other practical and creative uses that don't require lots of RAM,
it's going to be a sweet little machine.

That's not going to prevent a lot of bitchin' and hatin' though!

Khannie

I like the gif.

Yeah, I think browsing is going to be very disappointing on it, even wih a lightweight desktop and a lightweight browser. Funny, I remember having a box around 2000 which had 64MB of ram and was running windows 95 and I never even approached using swap space. Browsing has just become a compute expensive task over the years.

Excluding the fairly decent graphics capabilities it's really no more powerful than a low end android. Then you're going to have the masses with their first introduction to linux (which can be frustrating in itself). The first 10,000 users though are likely to be fairly mid-range to high-end geeks (like us ). I expect the effort that those people put in to pay dividends for the less techie people coming after. I also expect development work on stuff like midori (the lightweight browser) to benefit significantly from the existence of the pi. I'll almost definitely get my developer hat on if I come across bugs or issues in the core day to day software and it's a long time since I've considered contributing time to open source stuff.

Lastly, I don't think it'll be too long before we see an arm v7 version with 512MB of RAM. That would actually be a really useful computing device for day to day desktop use. The laptop I'm using right now only has 1G of RAM in it and I /still/ can't justify upgrading to 2G (running ubuntu 11.04).

Doge

Looks like the meme I mentioned came into effect a bit earlier than I expected
after some "Crapberry Puke" comments on Toms Hardware.

If you check out the latest news there was a bit of journalistic **** up today.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/633

Basically David Braben was being interviewed by Eurogamer for an article,
and didn't quite specify between the release date for the consumer units and the educational units (which are to be shipped to schools in September).

Eurogamer got mixed up and published an article saying the Consumer units won't be sold til September, even though the batches will be finished on the 20th of this month.

So Tom's Hardware followed suit by putting this headline up on their homepage:
"Raspberry Pi not available to consumers until September"

Hence the hate comments on that site.

Thankfully both sites have fixed the false updates now.


However...

there's a far more interesting story regarding Wired Magazine that Liz has posted in the comments.

And after reading it my respect for that magazine has gone down to nil, for being so vicious in getting an article from them, and publishing a completely made up BOM (Bill of Materials) for the Raspberry Pi.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/633#comment-11201

Liz wrote:

"Wired asked us to give them a copy of our BOM. We told them we couldn’t do that because it’d land us in hot water with our suppliers (particularly Hynix and Broadcom); if their other customers were to use our BOM to demand similar pricing, we’d be in trouble. So instead, they *made up* a BOM (which was gratuitously wrong). They told us they were doing this, and we asked them not to; saying we’d be happier for no article to appear at all. They published it anyway. Our suppliers started getting calls from their other customers, as predicted; we had a lot of apologising to do.

Slightly less serious, but still damned annoying: Wired also demanded pictures of a cased version of the final board. This was well before Christmas, at which point we didn’t *have* any beta or final boards, still less any cased ones (the cases are being finished after the board themselves are finished at the end of this month). They didn’t take no for an answer, and kept asking, and asking, and asking…and then photoshopped a case onto an alpha board (wrong size, wrong proportions) for their magazine. Which is misleading, but it’s nothing like as damaging as their efforts with the BOM were.

Needless to say, they’re off the list for press samples, and they’re not getting any more interviews either (they ran Rob ragged in preparation for this, then never used any of the material they’d got from him). Wired seem to believe they’re still as relevant as they were in 1998. Luckily for us, they’re not; we’ve interacted with hundreds of journalists over the last six months or so, and not a single one of them has been as hard to work with as Wired were."

Good on the Raspberry Pi team for refusing to give Wired magazine any future press info after how they were treated.

It's not like they'll be losing much press anyway, with all the positive coverage and attention the project is getting.

eth0

Raspberry Pi is full of binary blobs and closed source sections. Wouldn't bother with it rly particularly not when its made in Chickity China land

Dublin_Gunner

eth0 wrote: »

Raspberry Pi is full of binary blobs and closed source sections. Wouldn't bother with it rly particularly not when its made in Chickity China land

Why?? Exactly what would you intend on doing with it? If trying to take over the world with it, Pinky might be best advised to inform Brain that this device wont suit that need.

However, if you plan on using it for a bit of programming / device control application development or even something like a home media device, you'd be hard pushed to do much better.

IMO an excellent little device that could be used for all sorts of applications from media / HDCP applications to even form the backbone of a fairly sophisticated alarm system if you wanted to put your mind to it.

The possibilities are endless.

How about a media server that doubled as your home's alarm system? All in a little device controlled by your iPhone strapped to the back of your TV.

These types of devices have the potential to absolutely revolutionise how we interact with electronics, and control every day items at home or in work.

All it takes is a little imagination.