Raspberry Pi: A £15/$25 computer to inspire young programmers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/05/a_15_computer_to_inspire_young.html

by wlll • 15 years ago

61 36 15 years ago

bbc.co.uk

wlll• 15 years ago

The official site: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

tropin• 15 years ago

I want two or three. No kidding. Any possibility to upgrade RAM? When will this be avaliable?

At 20€ they're going to sell like crazy.

andfarm• 15 years ago

> Any possibility to upgrade RAM?

Probably not; they're likely using a SOC with integrated memory.

wccrawford• 15 years ago

"In some ways, the project resembles the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme,"

"The volunteer team has to produce a better working prototype, has to show that it really can be manufactured for around £15,"

So yeah, it really IS like it... Especially in that their stated price won't end up being what they sell for in the end.

At the $25 stated on their homepage, I'd buy a few of them for playing with... Well, if it had an ethernet port, anyhow. A computer without an ethernet port isn't much of a computer these days.

jamesgeck0• 15 years ago

Fortunately, URB-to-Ethernet adapters aren't very expensive.

sentinel• 15 years ago

But then where would you plug your keyboard?

dspillett3• 15 years ago

Or USB->WiFi.

The mini-USB bluetooth adaptor that they currently have stock of in my local pound shop (for, not surprisingly, £1) (they look very like http://cgi.ebay.co.uk//300388440707 so may be the same thing) work perfectly will under Ubuntu (at least on 10.04 and 11.04). So as long as the bluetooth stack doesn't eat too much of that small chunk of RAM and network speed is not a big issue you could use the PAN or DUN profiles for networking on the cheap, tethering to a phone or a desktop/laptop with bt and PAN/DUN support.

The official site doesn't say anything about power but as the image only shows USB and screen connections I assume it runs off the power a USB connection can provide, so it could probably run nicely off a pair of AA or AAA batteries. I can think of a number of play projects for monitoring (attach a cam, mic, temperature probe, and so on via USB) or display (attach a small LCD screen and/or a beeper and you've got a portable status monitor for some other project).

Something like this could be great fun for a nerd like me to spend a bit of time playing with. A bit like an Arduino for a software-only person. If they do hit the market at the £15 estimated or there abouts I'd certainly buy a couple, as I'm sure would a couple of my friends.

mbenjaminsmith• 15 years ago

Does anyone know if this could be made to run iOS?

fsipie2• 15 years ago

I couldn't do it but I bet it's possible..

mikecane2• 15 years ago

If not iOS, then I'd expect Android. The XDAers would be all over it, I think.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

I doubt that - Android is a memory hog, even my phone has more memory than that.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

With the built in 1080p h.264 high profile decode[1] for £15 this could be the world's cheapest media centre. It might not be enough to run boxee, but should this go to market at that price, a lightweight media centre distro would definitely make this something else.

I think I'd probably buy two or three for hacking on.

joeconway• 15 years ago

Looking back at the computing lessons I had in secondary school, I learnt a lot but I think that having access to something like this would have been much more beneficial than using Access and VB6 for coursework (in 2007).

I hope they can actually get the cost down to something close to the £15 they say. Good luck to them.

binarymax2• 15 years ago

I'm confused - he said its good for children who might not have a computer at home, but there is only an HDMI connection. What is the likelihood of a family not owning a PC - but does own a TV advanced enough for HDMI?

ZeroGravitas• 15 years ago

I think you'd be surprised how advanced and expensive some people's home entertainment systems are compared with some other parts of their lifestyle.

jonsmock• 15 years ago

Absolutely agree. I help move some of the poorer families at our church, and I'm always astounded at where their money is spent. One family wore hand me down clothes and had little else in their house, but they had a 60"+ TV in their living room.

Most families have a TV, and just about every TV you can purchase these days has HDMI. I'm incredibly sad when my teacher friends describe how few of their students have computers at home to do their work.

elliottcarlson2• 15 years ago

If you look at the actual site (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) it mentions Composite and HDMI video output under the tech specs.

binarymax2• 15 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. I think this is a great project and hope it takes off. I would definitely buy one myself to play around with.

vabole• 15 years ago

I was also surprised by that. Personally, I do own both a computer and a smartphone, but I do not have the HDMI supporting TV.

fsipie2• 15 years ago

Wow. This looks amazing! Have contacted them and said I'd like to buy some, and I wouldn't mind writing or porting some educational open-source games on them. Great, great idea.

protomyth• 15 years ago

I've been wondering when this generation's Commodore 64 or Atari 800 would show up. It seems like it is the smartphone / iPod touch, but those just don't seem to do the trick for this type of stuff.

I do wonder what could be built while keeping the price under £60 / $100.

sedachv2• 15 years ago

This would be ridiculously awesome. Gumstix sell similar form-factor ARM boards for $130. You can get cheaper ARM boards (pico-SAM9G45 for $70: http://www.mini-box.com/pico-SAM9G45-X) but they are much larger. This is only somewhat larger than a Teensy++ (http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/), which is $24 but is powered by a diminutive AVR chip.

kschua• 15 years ago

If you look at the specs. This doesn't include the cost of storage (SD card etc) which would push the price beyond the $25.

Still I am blown away by the size

mikecane2• 15 years ago

Why don't they do a Kickstarter for this? Or do they already have the funding lined up?

angusgr• 15 years ago

I had a few vague thoughts:

* How is it powered? I assume neither composite video or HDMI can provide power to it (which would be cool), in the photo it looks like some it's probably powered from that ribbon cable that's soldered to the through-holes on the side. Would be neat if you could power it from (say) common older mobile phone chargers.

* I wonder which ARM SoC (system-on-a-chip) it's using,and what their open source support is like.

* Neat it has GPIO (general purpose input-output pins), I wonder where they are broken out? The row of 6 full-size through-holes in the photo look good, but it doesn't look there is much additional board real-estate for making other easy-to-solder additions.

* I know from working w/ WM8505 devices that ARM9 + 128Mb RAM is a fairly sorry combination for Ubuntu. I'd be surprised if they final device isn't built on something like Debian, they still support ARM9 (Ubuntu stopped after partial support in 9.04), have lower spec requirements overall, and their 'armel' package repository is huge.

sbierwagen• 15 years ago

  How is it powered?

USB port. No, wait, that doesn't make sense, if it's supposed to be a USB host. And you certainly can't draw power from HDMI.

If only their site wasn't so uselessly spartan!

gaetanomarano• 15 years ago

--- it's similar (but very much different) to http://www.MyLowCostPC.com project, that, unfortunately, hasn't raised, so far, the founds to develop it --- but the Raspberry Pi is much close to this one http://humaneinfo.com/pc.html ---

lucasjung2• 15 years ago

When you factor in the cost of a monitor or TV, keyboard, and mouse (plus any other peripherals required for your curriculum and the USB hub you would need to use them), I think that this $200 laptop is probably a more cost-effective solution: http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html

Raspberry Pi: A £15/$25 computer to inspire young programmers

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