Raspberry Pi and America,

On 30 June 2012 19:56, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: [...] To answer those of your points that I feel that I usefully can: Documentation - yes, it does have some. It's online, i.e., on the WWW. This is the 21st century; that is how things are done now. Yes, it does at the moment expect you to have a PC and Web access already. This is not, *at this stage*, a stand-alone computer. This is the early, developers/hackers version of the product. AIUI, there will subsequently be a more polished, complete release, in a case, with a finished, optimised OS and so on. OTOH, for embedded projects and the like, this version is more suitable as you don't have to buy all the bits. As for why not to use a PC: * New PCs are expensive * PCs are elaborate with many moving parts & require expert maintenance * PCs do not tolerate stressful environments well * PCs have active cooling - spinning fans to chop little fingers, mains voltages that are dangerous, slots that could have foreign bodies inserted into them, etc. * PCs are large and bulky * Because of their bulk and fragility, and the need for expertise to refurbish them, old PCs are not easily obtained and shipped to where children might readily have access to them. * PCs require lots of electricity to run * Some of the complexity issues could be solved by a single-disk Linux distro that provided a range of simple tools, but the vastly heterogenous nature of PC hardware means this is hard to implement. * Also, Linux scares off nontechnical users who only know Windows; this is less of a problem with a computer that cannot run Windows at all. Openness: I have not called it open. Others may have. There are various OSs available for it - a range of Linux distros and RISC OS. Linux is FOSS; RISC OS is not, it is shared source. The source is obtainable and can be modified as you please, but all copyrights must be assigned to Castle Technology and resale is prohibited without an (inexpensive) commercial redistributors' licence. Some of the /drivers/ for Linux are not FOSS, notably the graphics driver; they are closed-source, proprietary, but freeware. You still need the graphics driver for console mode, so it is not possible to build a 100% GNU FOSS OS image for it yet. Someone may reverse-engineer a console-mode-only kernel driver, I guess, but this is a graphical computer. If you want text-mode-only, there are cheaper devices out there - for instance, this: http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=19068 [[ Freescale Announces $13 ARM Cortex-M0+ Microcontroller Board The Kinetis L Microcontroller board from Freescale. The board features a Cortex-M0+ ARM processor, a suspiciously familiar minty-fresh board silhouette, and headers that remind me of summers in Ivrea. From EDA360: [via] There are two major reasons for reading this blog post: A 32-bit microcontroller that sells for as little as $0.49 in 10K quantities and consumes 50?A/MHz A $12.95 development board to be available late in September These are two of the salient attributes of the Freescale Kinetis L microcontroller, previewed at Design West in San Jose back in March and now announced at the Freescale Technology Forum in San Antonia with alpha samples shipping. The target for this product is the vast sea of products and applications that currently incorporate 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers?mainly for reasons of legacy code, legacy familiarity, and cost. It will take a compelling product to hurdle these barriers and the low prices for the Kinetis L silicon and development board will help to jump those hurdles. ]] Hardware needed for embedded use: * a PSU (either a wall-wart with a microUSB connector, or a powered USB hub with a USB-to-microUSB cable; * an SD card to boot off. The processor complex comprises a Broadcom SoC containing GPU, ARM core, sound, glue logic etc.; this is in a square package, the lower face of which interfaces with the main board and the upper face of which interfaces with a single RAM chip. So when you look at the board, all you can see is the RAM chip; the package with the SoC is beneath this and inaccessible. Waiting times: given a few months, as production ramps up, I am sure these will shrink to nothing. OS: AFAICS, Raspbian looks like far and away the best bet, but it's not mature or ready yet. Personally, I'd wait for it - but apart from as a very cheap RISC OS machine, I have no use for one myself. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884