26 Jun
2012
26 Jun
'12
1:53 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 1:23 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 June 2012 17:49, Dave McGuire <mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
>
> ?About the Raspberry Pi in particular...I'm having a very hard time
> getting excited about it. ?It's a neat board, to be sure, but it's only
> the twentieth or thirtieth design just like it (and nobody got this
> excited about its predecessors), and you can't actually GET one without
> spending months on end on a waiting list.
I have yet to put myself on such a list because I hate the waiting game.
I do plan to play with them once I can actually *purchase* one without
fiddling about.
I am a bit surprised by the sheer level of hype
myself, but I think
the extreme cheapness is what is driving people. This might be harder
to understand in America, where even in bad times, you guys typically
have lots more disposable income than we do...
At $25 for no Ethernet or $35 with Ethernet, the price-point is so low
that it doesn't take a lot of effort to talk oneself into it, nor does
one feel bad about ordering one "just in case" a great idea comes
along.
When a ready-to-use computing element costs less than a good steak
dinner, it's easy to buy one for frivolous reasons. At twice or
three-times the cost, I think it's "expensive enough" to have to have
a "good reason".
The idea of a complete functioning RISC computer, all
of whose
software is free, for ?30 including tax, is proving very enticing to
people here. It's not very powerful, but then, it also doesn't take
much power, so people are using them for media servers, digital
signage, monitoring and control.
I certainly hope to put one to use for digital signage. I see that
most of Xibo has been ported to the Raspberry Pi, but it's not quite
there yet. I'm still fiddling with 1.0+ GHz boxes with a gig of RAM
to get the Ubuntu/Python Xibo client working for technology
conventions I work at. I'd *love* to be able to velcro a RP to the
back of an LCD and just walk into a hall, hang the LCD on a visible
wall, then punch the power button and walk away. Not there yet, but
the goal is in sight.
For many people, over here, devices costing ?150, such
as a
Beagleboard, are too expensive to buy for curiosity or as a toy. An R?
is the price of a good meal with a beer; that is disposable income for
a lot of people, whereas a Beagleboard or a Pandaboard is the cost of
a cheap weekend family vacation.
Agreed, even here. I haven't gotten into the Beagleboards because
they are above my "curiosity" threshold, but I've done a few projects
with Arduino because I can roll a finished version on a perfboard or a
$3 blank DIY Arduino clone PCB by adding a $3.25 MCU and a handful of
cheap parts and by the time I'm done, I've spent less than $10 adding
smarts to a project (though I do have one where I repurposed a spare
Gen3 MakerBot extruder controller because it had three 12V MOSFETs
with screw terminals - it made driving an RGB LED strip a matter of
"screw down 4 wires and write 5 lines of code". The hardest part of
the project was cutting an Ethernet cable in half to feed power to it
via its 8p8c (RJ45) jack). I still plan to play with the Raspberry
Pi, but it's IMO a better wee desktop than a physical computing
platform precisely because it only has 3.3v current-limited I/O that
require external components to do anything with.
-ethan
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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