Is the Raspberry Pi real at that price?

I would think those folks would *benefit* from the stated goal of wanting to promote interest in "tinkering"!

Reply to
Don Y
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Until I see one in the flesh I would prefer not to comment. My initial understanding is that it is not entirely closed and it has been designed to make it attractive to youngsters. Time will tell how good a job Raspberry Pi have done on this. I have to say their Charity returns suggest that like all UK stuff this has been done on a shoe string budget by the main players calling in favours from everywhere.

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They are certainly not living high on the hog with an annual income of only £165 in 2010.

We will just have to wait and see. I hope they have got it right according to their aims to make computing interesting as a subject in schools.

I think that is unfair. Broadcom have almost certainly put up the money to make this thing possible both in terms of fabrication and manufacture with a target market of education. I think it is worth a try. Chemistry and physics have been completely emasculated in schools with no "interesting" experiments permitted any more by the draconian health and safety culture and legions of no-win no-fee lawyers.

No. These are the good guys responsible for verifiable hardware silicon compiler technologies and some other *very* good stuff. Braben & Bell wrote Elite which included some cunning hidden line removal tricks so that flight simulator guys Evans & Sutherland met them on a UK visit.

The pedigree of the two guys that I have previously known suggests to me that this thing might be very good for teaching in schools and to get kids making programs for themselves at home. Depends really how easy they have made it to do sprites and other game components.

The world at the moment is crazy. We should have the latest toolsets with full static testing and dataflow analysis used for teaching so that the next generation learn good habits. Instead the appropriate technologies for static error detection are only available to major corporate players at vastly inflated prices and ignored by engineers who have already picked up too many bad habits to use them :(

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Regards,
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:34:37 +1100) it happened keithr wrote in :

I dunno. I am retired, and am very critical of this so called 'educational' thing. There is no educational aspect in it any where.

Some closed source toy with closed binary drivers, hardly any I/O, missing keyboard, missing power supply, and missing a good book that explains computahs, electronics basics, programming basics, no display, not even a decent housing, how long will it live with 'kids' who put it on the table next to the metal ballpen or whatever, static discharges from rubber shoes, It is all hype. Press will publish any release you send them, including flying cars and what not. So what age group is this targeted at? Do they even have a soldering iron, some scope? You NEED that. And the youngsters that DO have access to that stuff will likely get a board with chips that have full documentation so they can get the maximum out of their toy. This strawberry pie has had far too much media exposure,

The Microchip PICs were and are extremely popular with the younger generation because they have decent datasheets, are easily programmable, and are available almost everywhere locally. As Don pointed out there are small boards with PICs too that run Linux for those that want that (for many projects you do not need a top heavy multitasker). PICs are cheap too. Look here for some projects I did with PICs:

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Some are not so simple, some if not all require a PC, if only for programming.

Now let's look at the strawberry or whatever cake. That Broadcom chip is actually a media player chip. If you just install Linux and perhaps run the X server, then forget about the media player aspect, because ***X runs at a fixed H and V resolution***. Let's get a bit technical, after all this is a design group, many Linux enthusiast are here too. I recorded (with Linux and MY software) last night some DVB-S2 HD movie from Germany ZDF via satellite: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16006144000 Mar 6 00:58 spy_game_2001_german.ts

Now let's look at the format this is transmitted in, and what is in there: panteltje10: /video/satellite # mediainfo spy_game_2001_german.ts General ID : 3F3 Complete name : spy_game_2001_german.ts Format : MPEG-TS File size : 14.9 GiB Duration : 2h 41mn Overall bit rate : 13.2 Mbps

Video ID : 6110 (0x17DE) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : Main@L4.0 Format settings, CABAC : Yes Format settings, ReFrames : 5 frames Duration : 2h 41mn Bit rate : 11.2 Mbps Width : 1 280 pixels Height : 720 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16/9 Frame rate : 50.000 fps Resolution : 24 bits Colorimetry : 4:2:0 Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.244 Stream size : 12.6 GiB (85%)

Audio #1 ID : 6120 (0x17E8) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 2 Duration : 2h 41mn Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 256 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Resolution : 16 bits Video delay : -1s 263ms Stream size : 295 MiB (2%) Language : German

Audio #2 ID : 6121 (0x17E9) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 2 uration : 2h 41mn Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Resolution : 16 bits Video delay : -1s 216ms Stream size : 221 MiB (1%) Language : qaa

Text #1 ID : 6130 (0x17F2) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) Format : Teletext Language : German

Text #2 ID : 6131 (0x17F3) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) Format : DVB Subtitles Language : German

Menu ID : 6100 (0x17D4) Menu ID : 11110 (0x2B66) List : 6110 (0x17DE) (AVC) / 6120 (0x17E8) (MPEG Audio, deu) / 6121 (0x17E9) (MPEG Audio, mis) / 6122 (0x17EA) (AC-3, deu) / 6123 (0x17EB) (MPEG Audio, qaa) / 6130 (0x17F2) (Teletext, deu) / 6131 (0x17F3) (DVB Subtitles, deu) / 6170 (0x181A) () Language : / deu / mis / deu / qaa / deu / deu /

------------------------------------ That is the transport stream for this transmission. You will notice (perhaps) that the format is 1280 x 720 @ 50 fps progressive. If you want to play this in X with for example mplayer, EVEN if it has all the codecs, then theoretically the X server would have to refresh frames as 50 Hz IN SYNC with the video. That is for a MEDIAPLAYER, and that is one thing they claim it can do. Unfortunately X does NOT sync to the video framerate, so it will NORMALLY tare frames and drop frames at random, even if you add a modeline for 50 Hz. The fact with MEDIAPLAYER chips is that the CHIP does the grabbing of the next frame from memory, decodes it, displays it, and then grabs the next frame. I am sure this chip can do that, but can the standard Linux that comes with this thing support that feature? To give some idea what the actual problem is here, read this thread please:

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So, as far as I can see, and that is not far in this case as most of that stuff is closed source, as a MEDIAPLAYER this thing is not very usable. And you cannot FIX it because it is closed source. It seems to come with Fedora Linux, now that is RatHead (had to drop that one on you) Linux, and it will be incompatible with the rest of the universe by design anyways, I'd love to be proven wrong, but the above issue make it a nono for me, it already is a nono for the simple fact that PICs are more suited for small projects, can be programmed in asm, close to the hardware, and then are faster, boot faster, more reliable than Linux for simple control operations like, as some person mentioned, controlling things around the house or some robotics or what not.

The ONLY reason I would want a strawberry cake would be a REAL multimedia player, or if it actually had WiFi.., as that would add to the spectrum of what you can build in a few days, but I already have several Linux boxes, some far more advanced than that hype thingy, so, And then to teach kids about electronics, maybe Winfield's The Art of Electronics is a bit too high a level for them to start, give them some transistors and an Ohm meter, some batteries, LEDs, the works. To teach them about PROGRAMMING give them a laptop or PC. maybe the OLPC.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

AFAIK this document is useless because its far from complete.

Maybe its the people that create hardware & software for SoC based systems for a living and know about the pitfalls? In my experience proper documentation is key to be able to do something usefull with a SoC. So far the RP can run Linux. But what if you want to control something with it and need to write your own drivers to do that?

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Electronics is a bit

But do NOT teach them the stupid term "computah".

Reply to
FatBytestard

I was waiting for someone to bring this up...

They Has Hell Weren't.

As someone who was of the 'younger generation' when the PICs and Stamps came out, I can tell you they were never seriously interesting to us. No, the excited approvals of a hand-held grandkid doesn't count-- we're talking about the self-taught 10-14 year-olds. Sure the chips were cheap(er)-- the programmers weren't, and f*ck the guys running garage businesses that sold them on the other side of the country. 100 fauxBASIC programming steps? Erase-Program-Run cycles? Tiiiiiinnnnnyyyyy memories? Harvard architecture? All of those were show-stoppers and classified them as junk. A 10 year old hand-me-down VIC20 was a better deal!

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Chris
Reply to
Chris Baird

One of my planned uses of the Pi (once I finally get one) is to play Oolite on a big TV (for those that don't know, Oolite is the modern descendant of Elite, which was developed for the original BBC computers).

I don't know how much the Pi will be useful for teaching kids programming or other computing, but I think that even if you use it for games or a media player, it will still raise an awareness that the world of computing is not limited to PC's and windows. I don't see it inspiring millions of kids to program - but if it inspires some to look at what's inside a computer, and what is needed to put one together, then that's good.

Reply to
David Brown

Absolutely.

Lua is a good language to build into embedded systems too - I'm looking at this for a new project I'm working on:

Reply to
David Brown

Nowadays a lot of games use scripting. My 10 year old son is already working on scripts written in Lua to program some intelligence in items he created in an online game where you can build your own virtual world.

I don't know what to think of it but I guess its better than just watching TV.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:14:29 +1100) it happened Chris Baird wrote in :

That is bull. Parports were common in those days,

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I added some 10 cent parts to make i tsuitable to program PIC18 http://127.0.0.1/panteltje/pic/jppp18/

There are very few PICless people posting here. the small PICs should be programmed in asm (16F84 was very popular). Kids did it all the time.

There are some who cannot program and nveer will learn, those run things like eclipse and java today and are responsible for the slow bloat of the world. They look down on teh littel cute micros. Learn to work with the tools you have, the 8051 was Harvard too, found in almost everything, There was also the 8052 AH BASIC, a 8051 with BASIC in ROM.. Was not a very good basic, but I still have a box with that that I build in the eighties.

You sound like a C++ or java cripple.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:31:55 GMT) it happened Jan Panteltje wrote in :

Or if you are further away:

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hehe

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

That is a very interesting link! Now that is something which has a potential educational value.

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Are you still fixing audio interface transformers and debugging TI's DSP serial port DMA and what-not? Or have you moved on to a different employer by now?

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Umm... haven't tablet PCs (ARM-based Androids and iPads) largely already done this?

I mean, I *think* even the most non-technically-savvy kid today knows that "Android is not the iPad OS is not Windows is not the Mac OS?" :-)

Reply to
Joel Koltner

I hope I didn't accidentally write something helpful and informative here. Maybe I should add a gratuitous insult to fit in with the spirit of the rest of the thread. :-)

Reply to
David Brown

monkeys

level

the

Software,

just

Useless advertising blurbs

Nothing of interest there, either.

More useless blurbage

"file damaged and could not be repaired"

Don't know what use that is...

Why do I need to know about a memory module?

Nope. Nothing interesting *AT*ALL*.

certainly

I think you're putting words in people's mouths. I don't see anything here worth the hype it's already gotten. I predict a failure. Over-hype often does that.

Reply to
krw

"Fixing"? I never repaired any. ;-)

Yep. Back to real work. Still TI processors (though not the dinky ones), and ADI, and NXP, and Atmel. ;-)

Reply to
krw

I wish someone would do a "NetBook" in the tablet form factor. I'd love to have something like a GalaxyTab to carry around but I can't use an(other) Android gizmo.

Reply to
krw

cost

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need a net

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needs one.

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ridiculous.

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Wrong and wrong. Everybody that i know who does development work (hardware or software) has a complete computer, usually more than one. Since the model B has an Ethernet connection and can have linux all you need to do is ssh to it and there you go. No additional costs. Plus it will do various discrete IO that your laptop cannot do.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

So... how many 10-14 year-olds are allowed to wave a soldering iron near their mother's PC serious-work computer? Amiga computers were also more popular back in my day-- where was the PIC development software for them? I personally had a Commodore64-- its GPIO was 8 bits of TTL. Oh wait, how were you supposed to program the actual code for PICs again? Where's a 14 year-old going to get the money to buy an MSDOS machine?

As the 'hand-held grandkid' comment alluded too, PICs & etc. /weren't/ hacker-kid-friendly unless they lucked-out and found adult assistance.

By themselves? I think not. If you didn't have a nerd Uncle, you were out of luck.

The Raspberry Pi is like 25 years too late for me... If I were 13 today, I'd be salivating at the thought of getting one I can dedicate to learning Python on, costing less than a Nintendo 3DS video game that my fat (10yo..) brother cries for every month. I can learn with it! :D (Just don't let Mum find out it can view pictures and play movies. ;)

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Chris
Reply to
Chris Baird

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