Should there be further models of the Raspberry Pi?

The Pi designers had no say in the design of the SoC. They used one that was available to them that had the facilities they wanted at a good price.

To add the option of a VGA module would have need a major redesign of the system and would have meant increasing the design and retail price, the latter of which was *the* major consideration on the Pi's design.

I'm not even sure that original versions of the project had any video output in mind.

OK here's another for your list:

Fujitsu-Siemans 3815 FA. 15" SVGA with a permanently connected VGA cable. I have no idea how old it is: I got it from Cambridge Computer Resale in

2006 as an occasional-use server monitor.

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samsung syncmaster 2243 early models (not BX or BWX)

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Actually, they designed the SoC as a GPU for other projects (notably the Nokia 808 Pureview). The ARM11 was added at the last minute to make it suitable for the Pi, but the rest of the chip was already done.

Theo

Correct.

Not exactly...

The BCM2835 with the ARM core on it has been around for a long time. It was designed for other projects for customers who expected to use many millions of chips, like the Roku 2 series set top box media player.

It is true that the ARM core was added towards the end of the design stage, but it had nothing to do with the Pi project, which hadn't even started at that point, I believe.

The RPi was concieved to help teach children to program. Therefore its primary use would be in schools. I doubt schools have loads of old TVs lying about.

It has these because they were cheap to implement. Composite video is so s**te I never want to use it again.

--snip--

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(\__/)  M. 
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around 
(")_(") is he still wrong?

You can now. When I bought my Pi there were hardly any converters on the market and they were a lot more expensive. The fact they are cheaper and more plentiful now shows there is still great demand for VGA.

I wasn't proposing all RPis have to have a VGA output. A model 'C' would do.

--
(\__/)  M. 
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around 
(")_(") is he still wrong?

" if you think you might want an alternative to the various Linux-based offerings." is not a phrase I'd have expected to see in a "Geek/Nerd" techy newsgroup (at least it's not one you'd see every day)... ;-)

Of course, this being a RPi NG, you could hardly have used the more common phrase, " if you think you might want an alternative to the various MS Windows-based offerings." (context is everything).

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Regards, J B Good

It's supposed to kindle the same sort of enthusiasm that was widespread in the eighties when all the cool kids had some sort of computer at home, Spectrum Amiga Atari Commodore-64 BBC and all the other micros that were popular in the pre-IBM-PC era. When you had to type programs from a magazine to play the latest games, when kids wrote assembler to squeeze more performance out of limited hardware resources. Very much an after-school thing (apart from the BBC machines, unless you were a posh/spoiled geek).

only if you're looking at new stuff, there's plenty of old monitors out there with VGA only. (I've got 5, 3 CRTs which were free and two LCDs that cost me only parts to repair the inverter)

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?? 100% natural

Personally, I think the Beaglebone Black is the better Raspberry Pi at the moment (particularly as it has an ARMv7 CPU and it is significantly faster). And I'd hope to see something with a dual-core CPU next year at a similar price point.

Christof

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I think you can sell an LCD with VGA only to people who have never seen a similar display connected with DVI. So, it probably is very dependent on market.

Some 6 years ago at work we swapped all CRT monitors on existing systems to LCD, and on systems with onboard video there often was only a VGA output so they were connected using VGA (although the monitors did have DVI in).

It turned out that for a certain range of systems an option board was available to add DVI out to the system (not a videocard, a special card that fits in the videocard slot but only outputs the video from the onboard chipset to a DVI connector).

It was ordered and fitted to some 100 systems, and it really improves the picture quality. Not surprising, as with DVI there is a direct mapping from the pixels in the video RAM to the pixels on the screen, while with VGA there is a lot of effort to achieve that ("auto adjust" where you see the picture move and stretch to fit the screen) but it is never 100%. And of course there are analog artifacts like overshoot and reflection that are visible in the picture, that you don't see on DVI.

So it was money and effort well spent.

Indeed, and they have said as much - they get DVI/HDMI straight out of the SoC at no extra cost, but going VGA would cost extra for what to an extent is thought of as a legacy interface.

--
Cheers, 

John. 

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Then stump up the the 11 quid for the PSU they left out of the kit ;-)

--
Cheers, 

John. 

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Seems to be a cottage industry springing up:

-- Cheers,

John.

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Interesting. £37.19 (inc Vat) at Farnell.

I can't find much in the way of software or community support though.

Another Dave

Whoops! Just found this:

Another Dave

[ ... ]

One place to start:

Mel.

A few weeks ago it was around £34 (inc VAT), so seems to have gone up a bit...

There is also a fairly active mailing list

or

Christof

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