Raspberry Pi

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:11 am

Have been watching this develop for a while now.
Goes on sale today in the UK, ordering one later today.
Far from top end, but good enough to teach my kids on.
For £22/$35 you cant go wrong, even if it's just connected to a tv for movies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918

What do you lot think?? Discuss or discard??

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:14 am

a cerebral notch above lego mindstorms.
however a pi based hack into the mindstorms robotic kit can make an amazing experience. learning to conceptualize coding on a simple platform and applying the conceptual skills to actual source authoring is a good step ladder approach. There are not enough teachers who can code, to provide the fundamentals during highschool

Quote:

"People would buy computers like the ZX or the BBC Micro to play games or do word processing - but then they would find themselves being beguiled into programming.

"That's gone away, because of games consoles and because desktop PCs hide that programmability behind quite a large layer of sophistication."

Children like Emily are terrified to use the family computer for anything other than its pre-ordained function as a costly consumer device.

programming has been made overly sophisticated, and nebulous by the big software corporations, and home coding activities are strongly discouraged, even criminalized, this has to be reversed, and the black box mentality of a computer system has to be rewritten to a lego and linkin logs, and mechanno perspective

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:18 am

i was reading another article earlier and guess there was such demand that the sites are crashing.

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:32 am

Quote:

The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage.

This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems. It supports the Python programming language, BBC BASIC, C and Perl.
[wikipedia]

the development suite running on the pi "scratch" is here:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:36 pm

I think this is a great idea, thinking of getting one myself. I spent meny a happy hour messing about with my ZX specy. Lets hope it makes the world of programing a much more accesable one.

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 10:47 am

Im obviously exited about this dirt cheap linux device. Ill most likely get a few to hack around with

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 3:07 pm

I hope this actually achieves it's goal.

I run a web dev company, and trying to find youngsters who understand code is impossible. Teachers here in the uk think it means mircosoft office!

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 3:18 pm

Lord Trapper wrote:

I hope this actually achieves it's goal.

I run a web dev company, and trying to find youngsters who understand code is impossible. Teachers here in the uk think it means mircosoft office!

this is an effort largely due to philanthropists with a touch of reciprocal altruistic intent. the UK programme engineering industry is starved for new blood.

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 11:27 pm

Lord Trapper wrote:

I hope this actually achieves it's goal.

me too, alot of people think the youngins know alot about computers, the sad fact is most know f**k all - excuse the language. We need the emerging generations to embrace programming and technology - that will never happen in our windows centric environment; as the main goal of Microsoft seems to be to obscure what is actually going on. I honestly think i would be alot further behind if i didnt embrace linux around 4 years ago. Linux forced me to actually understand what my programs did. Now i miss the days when i used to compile my progs from source, even such a basic thing as compiling a program for my pc taught me tons.

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:32 am

I'm looking to get 3 of them, one for each of my kids.
Kids these days can fly when it comes to operating software, but i would like mine to be able to 'code the software' instead
They're curious enough when i have an open laptop on my desk, my eldest girl (10) can quite happily crack one open to replace it's cpu etc and rebuild it afterwards.
My youngest girl (7) prefers oiling my gun parts and reading fieldcraft manuals instead ! May just buy her an air rifle instead lol

Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:33 pm

" repeated disassembly can cause excessive wear, thereby reducing the accuracy, and reliability of the weapon" Laughing

can she do it blind folded in less than 30 seconds ? Laughing

or with thumbs taped down ? Laughing

the scratch site at MIT has a big following, and scratch has versions for pc win linux or mac. IMO its not about the PI (which is kewl) its about scratch and thats the thing that really makes the access to fundamental coding skills possible

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2012 4:14 pm

my raspi arrived last month and since the first moment i'm in "love" with it Wink

well of course the moment didn't last long, because my nephew got his hands on it. and now he's tring to build his own little game !!

thumbs up and i think i will get me an ODROID-X, cause the raspi, even if overclocked is meant for "small" things.. e.g. phpmyadmin will take some seconds to load ^^

but still great that it works

oh and btw. its overclocked to arm_freq=850 and sdram_freq=500 and no overvolt

Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 6:05 am

So.. Almost a year from the original post... Has anybody else out there tried one of these?.. I'm primarily interested in it as a media streamer. It seems to me to be a good alternative (open source) to the streamers on the market today. I'm just having a hard time finding a streamer on the market that has the features I want. Using one of these may (?) allow the custom features I am looking for.

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 5:21 am

I use 3 for running raspbmc (XBMC) media player, on various TV's around the house, they all connect to a NAS and work perfectly. They also play streamed movies and TV, a little slower initially but then plays fine.
I've also configured a few for work, we run an old UNIX manufacturing system and we had that running on a few old Win98 machines on our factory floor. I've now replaced those with pi's, configured the terminal to connect to our UNIX server and hey presto, they run perfectly.

If you aren't aware of XBMC and watch a lot of movies from a PC, then I suggest you look at it, it is by far the best media centre software I've come across... and it's free! There are tonnes of addon's that allow you to watch streamed movies, tv channels, music videos etc... etc..., so well worth a look if you're into that sort of thing. We got rid of our cable tv package, as we can get everything we need via XBMC.

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 6:09 am

solemnknight wrote:

I use 3 for running raspbmc (XBMC) media player, on various TV's around the house, they all connect to a NAS and work perfectly. They also play streamed movies and TV, a little slower initially but then plays fine.
I've also configured a few for work, we run an old UNIX manufacturing system and we had that running on a few old Win98 machines on our factory floor. I've now replaced those with pi's, configured the terminal to connect to our UNIX server and hey presto, they run perfectly.

If you aren't aware of XBMC and watch a lot of movies from a PC, then I suggest you look at it, it is by far the best media centre software I've come across... and it's free! There are tonnes of addon's that allow you to watch streamed movies, tv channels, music videos etc... etc..., so well worth a look if you're into that sort of thing. We got rid of our cable tv package, as we can get everything we need via XBMC.

what type of files would you be playing on it? any large HD movies, e.g. an 8Gb file MP4, MKV etc?? Just curious as was thinking of getting one of them ages back, to use for simply playing movies, with a USB drive attached which it plays them from. It would have to be able to play 1080p large files no problems. Have seen mixed responses about that though.