The comments in this thread kind of miss what I perceive to be the main point of Raspberry Pi. The great thing about Raspberry Pi is not that's it's a cheap enough PC that you can run Python on, it's that it's a cheap device that has GPIO pins and video.
There are significantly cheaper ARM boards than the Raspberry Pi, but to my knowledge none that have video output, or at least reasonably fast video output. Tell the children (or potentially interested adults that have only done software, never hardware) that they need to learn how to use a terminal connected through a serial port, or that they need to learn about cross compiling and other things and instantly the barrier of entry is huge. Tell them they can't have graphics, only a teletype and nobody will care. Let them have a simple thing they can plug a display and a keyboard into and program the I/O pins live while displaying graphical stuff you can see and relate to, now that's something!
Look at Arduino, an expensive and vastly underpowered device, in many ways unsuitable for the task people use it for, but very, very successful because people don't have to deal with all the boring and idiosyncratic low level setup stuff.
I keep watching, but all of the other ARM boards cost more than the Rπ – usually greater than 3x the cost of the RπB. You can occasionally find an Arduino for less than what the RπB will run you, and while it has the GPIO, it doesn't have nearly the crunch the Rπ gets you.
Mine will be running some network testing software, driving a small handful of devices – doing the work a small laptop was doing before, but with a better power budget and in a much smaller form-factor. I don't need a display while it's running - it's going to sit there and collect data for me until I command it to shut down, at which point, I'll remove the SD, grab the data, and process it a bit on a more capable box, although it's conceivable that I could do it all on the Rπ itself.
A bunch of us at Robots & Dinosaurs (a HackerSpace in Sydney) have been playing with the TP Link WR-703N wireless routers* reflashing them with OpenWRT - they're available from Deal Extreme or eBay for under $25 - it's got no video, but it includes ethernet and onboard wifi. One of the guys has a stackable "daugherboard" which breaks-out/adds a USB hub, FTDI/GPIO/JTAG and two serial ports: http://www.kean.com.au/oshw/WR703N/
It's not as high powered as a RaspberryPi though, only a 400MHz cpu and 32M ram (+4M flash) - they're useful little machines, but the onboard video on the Pi kinda puts them in a different class. On the other hand, a Pi with ethernet/wifi/powersupply costs several times what a TP-W703N costs...
Powered off of mini-USB (I have extra chargers laying about), SD cards are cheap cheap cheap (I also have a selection on-hand), and a case can be made out of LEGO bricks (again…).
You forgot to add-on "keyboard, mouse, and monitor". Again, these are things that people usually have.
For the dev cards mentioned up-thread, you'd have to have some sort of programming dongle, which more than doubles their cost, as well as get your hands on the right magic toolchain.
All true - still means that bare minimum, a Pi (delivered) is double the price of a W703N (delivered).
If you need add any/all of: wifi, power supply, SDcard, enclosure - to the Pi for your project, then I think "a few times the price" is a reasonable description. Not everybody will have "spares" of those "on hand", and if your project involves building more than one of whatever, then you can't rely on "on hand" extras.
On the other hand, if you don't need wifi and you do need video out, then the Pi is an obvious choice.
my project for the TL-W703N is a Tahoe-LAFS server/storage appliance - the router and a 1 or 2TB USB harddrive - if I could put 10 or 12 of them together and distribute them amongst friends, just a harddrive sized package they need to plug into the wall and allow on their wifi (or wired) network, in return everyone gets several hundred Gig of "private cloud storage" with baked-in encryption and distributed storage reliability.
Ok, for an embedded controller project without much in the way of I/O (just GPIO), you can get a cheaper unit, it seems. If you want the ethernet and the USB and mass storage (SD Card), and an actual O/S (Linux), it seems as if Rπ still has it beat, but this is a very good resource, thank you.
Absolutely correct. I'm excited about the Pi because I can see a number of low-end industrial applications that are now economically feasible. Once they get popular, competitors will arise and drive the price down even further.
Add a cheap touch screen and suddenly applications that could only be done with high $$$ interfaces suddenly come downmarket where there is (I hope!) a hungrily waiting audience with their wallets open :-)
Excellent point. I tried to get my boys excited about the Arduino and Netduino and they couldn't have cared less. But when the giant raspberry wallpaper came up they got excited.
When the machine was first pitched it was as a spiritual successor to the BBC Micro computer - to inspire and create a generation of bedroom programmers.
Compared to the home computers of the 80s, the Raspberry Pi isn't as simple to use, you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get to a point where you can start to code in Python and in my opinion is sufficiently difficult enough to deter the lay person; a little bit more complicated than turning on a machine and getting a BASIC interpreter you can start typing commands into.
In my experience most of the Raspberry Pi community has been more interested in porting emulators and media players, rather than nurturing basic skills in computing for kids. I believe the world still needs a machine to get kids more interested in computer science and away from the spreadsheets and word processors, but I don't think this is the machine to do it.
The current RasPi community is not the community it was really intended for. It's primary audience is kids and youngsters and allowing them to get a feeling for a computer.
And kids today are way smarter than I was at their age. They catch on very quickly and their curiosity as well as thirst to learn allows them to quickly adapt the RasPi to their wishes.
Anyone who thinks that it was easy for kids to program those old computers probably doesn't remember looking through thick manuals of memory addresses, which would lead me to question how much they really did.
LOL, totally. I remember entering in the escape codes for an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer because there was no such thing is a printer driver. Just copied it from the back of the manual. Took a weekend.
I think the tech media built these devices up a bit too much to the general consumer public. They are really a learning tool that you can tinker with, not a 'cheap pc' like they were built up to be. So many people got theirs after the pre-order wait and immediately complained about the performance. Think of them as a beefed up Arduino style device and you'll love it, think of it as a cheap computer for consumer use and you'll obviously be unhappy.
It's not that simple. The device has the potential to be an easy to use pc for the general public, but the community hasn't finished the software yet. The media reported the potential not the reality (there isn't a large quantity and it's just a little debian box).
As for the people who have one (like me) a large portion of the complaints aren't about the total performance capability, but it's the stability.. mine crashes all the time. There's some talk about fixing a bug in the USB driver that'll solve the issue (everything hangs up for 2-4 minutes every 20 minutes on average) but until that's finished it's rather unusable.
It sounds like using one like an Arduino involves a lot of extra work, like installing Linux. With an AVR or ARM microcontroller, all you have to do is flash your program, everything else is pretty much burned on the chip forever.
The Foundation have recently released a new distro, based on Raspbian, that gives better performance and is now their recommendation. Hardware floating point and better use of the ARM's instructions. X11 graphics performance still to be improved. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605
I think the pi will have some problems being successful with it's target market (kids who want to learn to code) if it's web browsing experience is dog slow.
Does anybody know if it is being actively used in education anywhere or are the users mostly geeks using it to run an apache server from their RC helicopters?
The education stuff will hit in September when the new term starts.
Right now everyone is in the process of creating materials to teach, getting the units out there and making sure teachers have the knowledge they need to get started.
Raspbian has made the browsing experience much better, but for a lot of teaching activities, making JS heavy sites work is not key.
Can someone please explain to me why the Pi is good for those looking to learn to code in python or scratch? Both are cross-platform, and both rely very little on the OS they run in, at least at the basic level.
The problem isn't what computer you run it on, the problem is having a computer to run it on in the first place. There are still many schools and many households without computers. The school I went to is still using Apple IIe machines given to them in a grant decades ago.
The raison d'être of the Raspberry Pi is to be cheap enough that every school could have one for each student.
I just read the article and apparently it also has composite RCA. They should advertise that part more than the HDMI, it is more useful for their target audience.
Actually the Window Manager seems to be OK (if a bit blurry). There may be problems with games going full screen for example open-invaders is a few pixels short on my PAL TV so only half of the score characters are visible, dunno if I should fix the display settings or fix the program.
Biggest problem I can see is that Midori as a browser seems to struggle on things like Google+ Photos (This may just be an out of memory and hitting swap problem, I've not investigated)
I haven't thought about what I'm going to do with mine yet (it was a gift from my father). It does come with Squeak so if thats useable on a CRT I may give that another go.
I believe there was a menu option to handle TV's overscan in the text-only interface that appears the first time you power it up with Raspbian installed.
The foundation did say they were planning a whole host of accessories to go along with it, and were hoping the community would rally around some of their own. This likely includes cases, mice/keyboards, and possibly small, cheap monitors.
A kid being able to save for and buy a computer that is all their own is a good experience for getting them enthused about learning with it.
The board is just a tool though. The real strength will be in creating a common experience and specific learning systems that teachers can use, share and improve and have a frame of reference that could work worldwide.
Some teachers are able to create a syllabus and teaching around programming already, but I'd say they're in the minority.
Plugging sensors and actuators into the Raspberry Pi and using them from a Python script in its Linux distribution is potentially easier and way cheaper than on any standard PC I know about. It has I2C and SPI ports that are easy to reach. It still needs some work though, but mostly software.
In addition to the 'cheap hardware for those that buy it as _only_ platform, not gadget no 17' reason that others provided:
I think for real progress (in a language/as a programmer) you need a goal. A project.
The Pi is even hyped and interesting among people that already have their other 16 gadgets lying around and a couple VPS on top: It's so small and so inexpensive, that you can get really creative. Never learned to solder? Doesn't matter that much if the (capable) main part of your pet project costs about as much as two dozen Cheeseburgers from McDonalds.
The PI is a standard platform which allows further tinkering - including hardware tinkering.
Lots of people write software. People could just follow Learn Python the Hard Way - guided by a clueful teacher that could be a successful method - but the critical mass of a bunch of people doing cool things on a standard platform exposes exciting possibilities.
Imagine a 512byte / 1k graphics demo challenge. Everyone has the same hardware, so you don't have the cross-platform woes of modern intro challenges.
The page you link to says the RPi can consume 435-465mA just from CPU and Ethernet, meaning only ~250 mA of the RPi's 700mA power budget remains to power the two USB host ports. Just plug in a USB device that draws more than 250mA (like a second RPi) and the claim of consuming more than 700 mA will be proved correct!
I've checked the RPi schematic [1] and it each of the USB ports protected by a miniSMDC014 rated for 140 milliamps [2] (and taking 150ms to trip at 1.5 A)
With two usb devices drawing 140 mA, a total of 280 mA would be consumed, thereby narrowly exceeding the 700mA power budget. Fuses are also typically quite imprecise for obvious reasons - they rely on current heating up metal that melts and breaks the circuit, and you don't want it borderline molten under normal operating conditions! So you may well be able to draw 250 mA per port without the fuses triggering.
You'll note the Raspberry Pi wiki [3] has a bunch of bug reports like "Ethernet connection is lost when a USB device is plugged in" attributed to inadequate power supply current.
So, I've got one and am experiencing similar issues.. I believe that right now the "power supply" issue had been used as a blanket response to ethernet/usb issues until people were seeing that problem with an oscilloscope on their power supply and no power supply issues.
What seems to be the common conclusion is that it's a bug in the DWC OTG USB driver/firmware:
A minimum of 700mA on USB is absolutely what a Raspberry PI takes and is listed as such on their website. Their site also says that each of their USBs port can handle only 100mA, and little more. [1]
"Generally speaking the model B raspberry PI was designed only for <100mA USB devices! That is because the PI's PSU was chosen with a power budget of 700mA in mind of which 200mA were assigned to the two USB ports, so the raspberry PI's (poly)fuses were designed only for <100mA devices, and typical 140mA polyfuses will have as much as 0.6 volt across them when drawing currents near the 100mA limit. As a consequence the USB ports are only directly suitable for "single current unit" USB devices which according to USB specifications are designed to work with just 4.4 Volt. Not only do non single current unit devices draw more current, (causing greater Voltage drops, and greater stress on the fuses) they also might require 4.75 Volt to work. Therefore any non single current unit devices will only work when powered from a powered hub."
Plugging in devices that take 150mA or more almost always cause problems. Sure these things aren't within the USB spec, but neither is my 2A iPad 3.
As for $25 vs. $35, oops. I pre-ordered months ago and had forgotten what I'd paid.
I actually like that browsing is kinda slow. One of my kids can code a little bit in Python, the fact that browsing is suboptimal helps him stay focused on coding. :)
I don't think it draws 700 mA except when it's really crunching CPU cycles.
The distro name is unfortunate. They should just call it "Raspian", it's a lot less tongue-tying.
I received mine in may if memory serves and I currently have it hooked up to a LCD monitor. We use it to watch movies, as a samba server and my 3 year old is learning to type on the command line even though he can't even read yet
We also use it to play music through mpd which is great because it can be controlled from any device in the house
All in all probably the best 35€ I ever spent
I got mine about 5 days ago (July 25th) in the USA. I ordered two of them, one to setup as a print server for my reprap, and other bizarre things like that, and another to actually play with.
I have a "desktop pc" that has a dual core Arm Cortex A7 at 1 GHz, 1 GiB of memory and a GPU that will tear the RPi to shreds. And it runs almost vanilla Ubuntu.
But it's not usable for a desktop PC. The desktop is slow and sluggish because it's not properly hw accelerated. You can't use it for web browsing because all the modern web sites are too heavy.
The low-cost ARM system on chips can run Android fluently only because so much effort has been put into making Android run on them. This work is done by the SoC vendors and is generally not upstreamed.
There are significantly cheaper ARM boards than the Raspberry Pi, but to my knowledge none that have video output, or at least reasonably fast video output. Tell the children (or potentially interested adults that have only done software, never hardware) that they need to learn how to use a terminal connected through a serial port, or that they need to learn about cross compiling and other things and instantly the barrier of entry is huge. Tell them they can't have graphics, only a teletype and nobody will care. Let them have a simple thing they can plug a display and a keyboard into and program the I/O pins live while displaying graphical stuff you can see and relate to, now that's something!
Look at Arduino, an expensive and vastly underpowered device, in many ways unsuitable for the task people use it for, but very, very successful because people don't have to deal with all the boring and idiosyncratic low level setup stuff.