$25 PC priced like a textbook, works with old analog TVs

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-a-25-pc-because-its-the-price-of-a-textbook-2011091/

by ukdm • 15 years ago

65 60 15 years ago

6ren• 15 years ago

With 700MHz ARM11 cpu (Broadcom BCM2835), if they had 1GB of RAM, it would be pretty close to a mainstream device (1GB is about $10 now, though they're using low power ram on the device).

See also: Demo: Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2932910 ----- Raspberry Pi - The alpha boards are here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2880507 ----- Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822255

Ein2015• 15 years ago

Where do I get $25 textbooks?

dman2• 15 years ago

Used on amazon.

tsm• 15 years ago

I wish.

http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approac...

yardie2• 15 years ago

The same place you get 50 cent antibiotics and $1 DVDs. If you are in the US, UK, CA, or western europe no need to apply. The publishers have decided you can pay more and will charge you thusly.

Or try to get one of the international students to give you theirs. Makes you laugh internally to know you spent $100s of dollars on engineering textbooks while the internationally student sitting next to you has the same one in paperback and probably paid $10 for it. And that's if their government scholarship doesn't include the book stipend.

oacgnol• 15 years ago

Buying international versions was one trick I wish I had learned when I was just starting college. It would have saved me a lot of money over time for the same content.

handelaar2• 15 years ago

At places selling textbooks to schools, not to university students.

reemrevnivek• 15 years ago

$25 for a textbook? If only! I spend $50-$300 per class for engineering textbooks.

Also, the analog port is, I believe, only available on the $35 version of the Raspberry Pi. It also works with HDMI and DVI (the latter through an adapter), so you don't need to go scrounging for an analog TV.

colanderman• 15 years ago

I suspect $25 for a textbook is more common in non-Western countries, which would likely be a great market for these things as well.

qxb• 15 years ago

I think the comparison is supposed to be with high / secondary school textbooks, which are cheaper than university ones. Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1]

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

If only that were the case... When I was in high school, replacing a lost Calculus textbook would have cost $120.

corin_• 15 years ago

The $25 textbook reference is based on children at school, not young adults in universities. I don't know about America, but in England $25 is a pretty good estimate for textbooks used by 8-18 year olds.

obarthelemy2• 15 years ago

I think both the analog port and the hdmi port are available on both versions (model A and model B, shades of the BBC micro). THe only difference between the 2 is the amount of RAM (128 vs 256) and the IO (1 USB vs 2USB + Ethernet). Be aware that the B's 2 USB + ETHERNET are internally connected to the Broadcom's single USB port though... you're not adding bandwidth, just ports.

gravitronic5• 15 years ago

There's a second story here.

Want to build this board yourself? You can't. Try to find information about this Broadcom BCM2835 chip. It only leads back to the Raspberry Pi (and a teardown of the roku 2 media player). Broadcom has not released even a 1-page summary datasheet on this chip. The only specs released are in relation to the Raspberry Pi.

I work for a small tech company that would LOVE to be able to use this chip and as of today it's impossible to even get the datasheet unless you are in "the club" of trusted broadcom customers (or their employee, as one raspberry pi creator is apparently?)

Will this chip ever be sold to the public?

pointyhat2• 15 years ago

Looking at Broadcom's part numbers, it's not a "current" product but it seems to fit in the same series of numbers as their 3G baseband processors and mobile multimedia processors.

I get the feeling it's a new mobile multimedia processor (judging by the HDMI+ARM+3d graphics supprot) which is being conveniently repurposed.

I reckon it'll be on the market soon enough but don't expect to be able to get anything out of Broadcom unless you want volume. Even Farnell don't carry their parts.

gravitronic5• 15 years ago

Sounds congruent to what we've experienced in the past.

Even worse is attempting to get customer support from them when you find massive problems in their part but you only ship a few thousand a year...

It just irks me that while the Raspberry Pi in itself is a great product that will be a minor revolution, its impact could be so much greater if this chip was available to all developers.

I guess I should shut my mouth, at least the second product to get the chip is a somewhat philanthropic effort and not another streaming media box.

joezydeco3• 15 years ago

Not just an employee, but an associate technical director at Broadcom. Others have found that the Raspberry Pi blog posts and etc are coming from Broadcom addresses. They're doing this on company time.

Earlier I thought this was a good marketing thing. Other companies like TI are doing this to get chips in the hands of hackers and spread some goodwill towards future commercial users of their chips.

But, as others have noted, Broadcom is a lot more standoffish with individuals that want access to sample parts and datasheets. So what is Broadcom gaining here? Inroads into educational markets? Access to open-source code written by tinkerers that they can incorporate into future EVKs and chipsets?

Maybe this odd part # is just a series of chips that have failed speedbinning and are being sold off cheaply?

gravitronic5• 15 years ago

The obvious guess would be their plan is to limit access to the chip until the pi became the "defacto standard" board, similar to the beagleboard or arduino, but I don't know why they're doing it.

They're selling at cost, so it's not to lock in the profit. Whats the benefit of retaining control? Unless they're also going to bring the board to a consumer product and don't want competition, but that's not really their market.

ebenupton4• 15 years ago

Would you believe me if I told you we're just nice guys, who used to be kids who couldn't afford computers?

asolove3• 15 years ago

In the last few weeks I've tinkered with the idea of doing hardware hacking. This and the plug-computers look like they have an interesting future. Where do you start to learn to hack real hardware? (I can do Arduino stuff, but seems like there is a big jump I don't know how to make.)

Palomides• 15 years ago

what sort of "hack real hardware" do you want to do?

asolove3• 15 years ago

I was going to say something else, but I thought, people should just say their dreams, even if they sound crazy, and maybe they'll find someone who can make it happen. So here goes:

I have a particular dream to open up an Android tablet; get plan9 running on it so I can share my screen, peripherals, files, and programs across a local network; and hack a keyboard onto the back so I can code while standing on the subway. Rough silly mockups here: http://electriceloquence.net/articles/re-imagining-mobile-ha...

bugsy3• 15 years ago

OLPC has a $100 PC, India has a $10 PC, and now these guys have a $25 PC.

What do they all have in common? They all have in common that NONE OF THEM EXIST. Yes, that's right. These projects get announced as if they are factual existing devices, with announcements using verb tenses suggesting they are currently in production and available. But then looking for details we find that no one is sure what the form of the device will be, or what parts will be involved because they are not developed products. That is a deceptive practice. And you know what, people who resort to such deceptive practices aren't the sorts of persons that can manage to deliver the goods.

edit: wow, downvotes, that is awesome. When downvoting, please also respond with a web page where I can purchase OLPC for $100, the India PC for $10, or this one for $25. Thanks.

CrazedGeek• 15 years ago

The OLPC XO-1 was designed for third-world markets: the only way you could acquire one in the US (and possibly other countries?) was by paying $200, which both got you one and sponsored one for a third-world child. (My cousins actually have one, so I know they exist.) They stopped this deal a year or two ago, though.

The India PC was never $10 outright, IIRC: it was $10 after some rather massive subsidies.

The Raspberry Pi literally went into alpha production a week ago, and software support is in its very early stages. Expecting to be able to buy it right now is a little silly.

mbrubeck• 15 years ago

OLPC's Give 1 Get 1 program actually cost each donor US$400, of which $200 paid for a donated laptop and $200 paid for a laptop for the donor. I don't know whether they ever eventually got the price close to $100.

I know this because I own an OLPC XO-1 that I acquired through the G1G1 program. See also http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/usa/olpc_xo_laptop_sale.ht...

soapdog• 15 years ago

I have an OLPC XO-1, I used it every week. It is my favorite laptop. I have very good net access with it and use this little gem for my server maintenance needs... cool little thing. If OLPC would do another give-1-get-1, I would pick three.

Now, I want do a little bulk order of Raspberry Pis when they are available and see what I can do with them for my community.

About the downvotes, you COULD buy an OLPC for $200 during the give 1 get 1 phase. I got mine, if you were truly interested in these projects, you would knew that. You're just a flamer...

Nate75Sanders• 15 years ago

How the hell did you type on that thing? I have one and I can _easily_ type on an Acer Aspire One 8.9" netbook, which many people complain about typing on.

I couuldn't come close to touch typing on my XO due to how close together the keys are. I think the feel of the keyboard would have been at least a minor stumbling block even if the key spacing were wider.

Obviously the design must work pretty well for children, so I'm not complaining about its intended use whatsoever, but I have no idea how an adult could reasonably type on it.

bugsy3• 15 years ago

How is it a flame? The $100 OLPC doesn't exist, the $10 India PC doesn't exist and this $25 PC doesn't exist. You confirm this with your post and then claim I am flaming and downvotes warranted.

If they exist, where are they?

I might as well post about the $75 automobile we have for sale, details on engine and number of wheels not available as we haven't decided, but the one thing we know is it's $75. Completely absurd to be taking such a claim seriously. The product doesn't exist. Pointing to products that cost substantially more doesn't prove anything. I can buy a new ASUS Eee PC 1015PE Seashell with 1GB RAM, a 1.66GHz processor and a 160GB hard drive for $200. That is something that is for sale and being produced by a for-profit company. OPLCs produced for $200 are not evidence that the $100 OPLC exists. The $100 OPLC never existed, nor did the $10 Indian PC, nor does this $25 PC claim.

digikata2• 15 years ago

I suspect you're right in that the $25 is probably just a BOM cost (and an optimistic one at that). Once you actually try to get it built and delivered into someones hands, especially in small batches, I'm sure that $25 could ballon 2-5x easily.

ebenupton4• 15 years ago

Nope. BOM cost is well under $25. The price includes a healthy component margin, assembly cost (in the UK), assembly margin, test and OTP programming cost. We are professional electrical engineers; we know how to do this stuff (and in any case, it's not rocket science).

Volume assumption is 10K batches. Anyone think I can't sell 10K of these?

Mokurai2• 15 years ago

The $100 Laptop could have been done, but OLPC and the buyer countries agreed that it was better to add more memory and storage, and use a faster processor. Also, the dollar was falling during the design phase. So the actual production cost came to $188, and the price to governments in quantity 10K was $189. More than 2 million have been sold, delivered, and put into the hands of students all over the world. (Later designs cost less, and we have every confidence in reaching the $100 price point due to the inexorable working of Moore's Law.) You can buy one on eBay for about $150. I own two, which I have named thing1 and thing2.

The $10 PC from India was a publicity stunt, not a PC, and never went into production.

The Raspberry Pi is $25, needing in addition a keyboard, display, external storage, and networking. That should come to about $150-$200. These guys just now announced the first engineering test build, and you complain that they didn't go into production yesterday.

"Please check your facts before posting nonsense to the Internet."--Beable van Polasm, alt.religion.kibology

zenijin• 15 years ago

Personally I think this is fantastic. I wish I could've had something to tinker with when I was younger, without fear of getting in trouble for messing it up.

I don't have kids of my own, but I'll probably buy these for my nieces and nephews, hopefully get them into it young.

I'll likely buy a couple of these for myself, too, to use as media PCs.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

What's to stop some consumer electronics manufacturer from buying Raspberry Pis and building them into a device? I'd actually like to do that myself, but if they're selling the boards at cost, that wouldn't be sustainable.

loup-vaillant3• 15 years ago

While the 25$ model certainly costs them, the 35$ one may not. Plus, if they have massive commands, they may be able to invoke some economy of scale.

donnaware• 15 years ago

Can you say vaporware?

$25 PC priced like a textbook, works with old analog TVs

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