Raspberry Pi Catch-All

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http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology...

This is so awesome!
It is a computer so small that I could wear on my wrist.
And it puts out 1080p! Seriously, if you ever once enjoyed anything cyberpunk, you must be drooling because the future is close at hand.

Reading comments I found another link
http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/...

There was a time in my life I would have nearly been willing to kill for a computer that fast, and these little guys are exactly the size of a credit card, and cost $35 for the expensive model.

It's interesting how tiny the ancillary technologies around it have gotten, and how dependent it is on them. You can't hook up an old-style keyboard at all, and you have only composite and HDMI video. So if we were somehow magically able to take these boards back to our younger selves in the 1980s, at most we'd be able to see a blurry composite picture, and would have no way of interacting with it. It would cost millions to develop a keyboard to plug into the unit, and getting a high-res display that could display an HDMI signal would cost at least tens and maybe hundreds of millions, if it could be done at all.

And, yet, I can buy a USB keyboard for like $10, and a reasonable HDMI display for maybe $200.

I'm definitely interested in picking up one of these. I love the idea behind them

Yeah, I'm pretty intrigued, too. A computer you could fit in a wall socket -- it's been done, but even those offerings were bigger.

I take it then you haven't seen the sheeva plug computers?
http://www.plugcomputer.org/

The raspberry comes in a much better price point though. One of my big projects coming up in the next 18 months is building a media server for the cars that the kids can use ipod touches as clients to view movies.

Yeah, at $35 I'll be picking up 1 for myself and 1 for my nephew.

Those are quite a bit larger. The Raspberry Pis are exactly the height and width of a credit card, though a fair bit thicker.

At £22, I'll get one for every room!

I'm excited for the Raspberry Pi boards but I'm tired of reading about them. I've been seeing stories posted to HackerNews about them for months now. I don't want to see another news story until the damn things are actually released and I can buy one (or more).

Well, it sounds like tHat should only be another month, two at most.

trueheart78 wrote:

Well, it sounds like tHat should only be another month, two at most.

True. I'm a little bummed as the "late 2011" release date touted months ago had me targeting these for Christmas gifts. But mostly, I just don't want to see another damn article hit the HN page until that article's title is, "Raspberry Pi now for sale."

The last I heard, they were thinking the second week of January, if the first boards tested out good. And the initial test run will be up for auction if/when they pass initial testing.

just checked, and there's a tiny error on the current boards that takes a blob of solder to fix, so presumably that means things will be delayed at least a couple more weeks.

This would be a great excuse to turn my USB hard drive into a DLNA server and share my printer on the network. I wonder what else I can make this do.

So they've put up private auctions for 10 of the beta boards (blog) as they get closer to release (the auctions end between Jan 7th and Jan 11th). 100% of the proceeds go to Raspberry Pi charitable foundation.

Finally, some news of progress: Raspberri Pi manufacturing is beginning.

IMAGE(http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4d712c7c49e2aed0482a0000/bart-scott.jpg)

I think this sold me. I've been looking for a good replacement of XBMC since I got rid of my old Xbox. Now I got to figure out how to use my Google TV's Logitech Revue controller on the Rasberry Pi.

According to the designer, who was on the team that helped design the Broadcom video chipset, its 3D engine is about twice as fast as an iPhone 4S. Not too shoddy for $25 and 2.5 watts in the base model.... the energy requirement goes up to a staggering 3.5 watts if you splurge on a Model B.

First batch finishing on February 20th.

We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month.

Then I have to wait for them to get from the UK to the US. Bah. I've been waiting on these, as I'm giving one to each of my team members for their birthday present this year. Two guys have already had birthdays and are waiting on their gifts!

I just saw that the graphics hardware on the Pi is going to require all sorts of closed-source libraries.

YUCK.

Malor wrote:

I just saw that the graphics hardware on the Pi is going to require all sorts of closed-source libraries.

YUCK.

What it came down to, they said, is that, "It's worth noting there are no other SoC devices with a similar graphics performance that are open source."

I'm very interested in seeing what these devices can do. Right now I have three thoughts for how I could use them:

1. Switch my HTPC to XBMC and get one of these for every TV in the house. Though technically I could probably stick with Plex and do this as well once this thing gets into people's hands.

2. In car install with some sort of cheap touch screen and a custom interface.

3. Super cheap NAS.

I'm hoping this can be to my son what the Apple ][+ and to a lesser extent, C-64 were to me.

3. Super cheap NAS.

It would be pretty slow, because its only connection with bulk storage will be USB 2. You'd also need, of course, the external USB drives... preferably 2, so you could back one up to the other. The chip itself could easily move a fair bit of data, but it just doesn't have much external bandwidth available, other than the Ethernet port.

You could probably share an SD card pretty quickly, but I'm not sure that'd be too useful.

I think its central, most interesting usage will be taking in data from SD or Ethernet and pumping it out the HDMI port. Most of the time, for most people, it's going to be a consumer of bits, rather than a generator of them. It's not that it can't generate bits of its own, but it is a fairly slow machine, probably about equivalent to a P3-300. You can do a hell of a lot with a machine that fast, but a 4.4Ghz Sandy Bridge machine is probably going to be on the order of ten times faster for single-threaded code, and probably twenty times faster for multithreaded apps.

The Pi would be an incredible blessing for people who don't have easy access to computing resources. If they can get their hands on a cheap DVI or HDMI monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse, they'd be in very good shape -- and they could share the peripherals between several Pis, if it came down to that.

Rykin wrote:

2. In car install with some sort of cheap touch screen and a custom interface.

Ooohhh! I support this idea and think we should look into it further.

Malor wrote:
3. Super cheap NAS.

It would be pretty slow, because its only connection with bulk storage will be USB 2. You'd also need, of course, the external USB drives... preferably 2, so you could back one up to the other. The chip itself could easily move a fair bit of data, but it just doesn't have much external bandwidth available, other than the Ethernet port.

You could probably share an SD card pretty quickly, but I'm not sure that'd be too useful.

I think its central, most interesting usage will be taking in data from SD or Ethernet and pumping it out the HDMI port. Most of the time, for most people, it's going to be a consumer of bits, rather than a generator of them. It's not that it can't generate bits of its own, but it is a fairly slow machine, probably about equivalent to a P3-300. You can do a hell of a lot with a machine that fast, but a 4.4Ghz Sandy Bridge machine is probably going to be on the order of ten times faster for single-threaded code, and probably twenty times faster for multithreaded apps.

The Pi would be an incredible blessing for people who don't have easy access to computing resources. If they can get their hands on a cheap DVI or HDMI monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse, they'd be in very good shape -- and they could share the peripherals between several Pis, if it came down to that.

Actually forgot it was USB only. As an HTPC owner storage for me is usually more about capacity than performance though.

Tigerbill wrote:
Rykin wrote:

2. In car install with some sort of cheap touch screen and a custom interface.

Ooohhh! I support this idea and think we should look into it further.

People have been doing it for years with Mac Minis and other small form factor machines so it shouldn't be too hard to do with one of these (probably easier thanks to how small these are).

I need wireless for my planned car htpc-type system. I was thinking of using a plug computer and then when the kids get a few more years older (5 and 3 currently) get them Ipod touches to use as the clients/screens. Since I do need to wait until the kids are a bit older things should get cheaper with more options in the meantime. Especially if the RaspPi can put pressure on the prices of plug computers.

Anyone managed to order one this morning?
I got up early but the websites were brought to their knees. I should have known better really but just couldn't help myself.

Has anyone seen the cotton candy?

Quite a bit faster, only has a USB and an HDMI port. And costs $200. Interesting, but not something you buy like potato chips.

edit: oh, and the Pi will decode H.264 high profile in 1080p, and it looks like that one will only do 720p.

where can you order this and have it shipped to the US?

TheGameguru wrote:

where can you order this and have it shipped to the US?

Orders sold out way earlier this morning, pre-orders are now on a sign up to get in line for pre-order only basis via the 2 listed partner's websites. They listed the demand far exceeding expectations.

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