27 Jun
2012
27 Jun
'12
7:52 a.m.
On Jun 26, 2012, at 12:49 PM, Dave McGuire 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.
Late reply, but better late than never.
I'll echo the comments about the extreme cheapness of the board being
a driving factor behind its popularity. There's also a positive
feedback loop going on; because the board is so popular (and also
because it's partly aimed at getting kids to program), there are a
lot of pre-baked, simple to use, and most importantly WORKING Linux
distributions already available with a lot of active development
going on. That lowers the barrier to entry, since it's a matter of
just torrenting an image and plopping it on an SD card instead of
finding the exact magical incantations required to make Debian
come up on one of the less popular boards.
Also, I mean, kids are picking this thing up for real and using it.
How can you not love this? It's what the Apple II was for me when
I was 6.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1444
That said, I don't think it's some sort of miracle tool for
people who want to build embedded systems, and I think it's a
bit overpowered for that. Most of the people pushing that angle
are looking for something that'll run Linux so they don't have to
do any actual work making their software run on bare metal when
they could easily accomplish what they're looking to do with a
32 MHz ARM or even an AVR. Of course, the primary advantage is
that the RPi is already built and costs $25-$35 and will one day
be available in quantity.
In any case, I got mine a few days ago but haven't had the round
tuits to do anything more than drop an Arch Linux image on it and
make sure it boots. I have lots of little fun things in mind,
though, and once my daughter is old enough to do something with
it besides try to ingest it, I'm making damn sure she learns how
to program. :-)
- Dave