Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-reveals-the-final-pcb-design-for-the-25-pc-20111115/

by ukdm • 15 years ago

109 82 15 years ago

JoeAltmaier6• 15 years ago

Cool. Portable. Cheap. Can run Quake II.

But what does that get you? Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard, mouse. So you can only use it where those things are.

For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer. That would be portable. Useful for a student lab, at my Mom's house, in a hotel.

Just a thought.

eugenejen• 15 years ago

I want to use them as cheap embedded systems that without KVM.

JoeAltmaier6• 15 years ago

Right, that's the primary use in my mind. Not gonna be much use to a primary school student.

codedivine• 15 years ago

Well, I think the idea is that you will plug it into a TV that you probably already have in the house. Thus both the HDMI port and composite TV-out. Keyboard and mouse still will be required though.

andyking• 15 years ago

Rather like some of the early, low-cost home computers which came out of Cambridge in the 1980s; see ZX Spectrum. It almost feels like history coming back on itself.

gps408• 15 years ago

It can run Quake III.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI

beagle33• 15 years ago

> For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer.

Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9 years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the same one, if properly partitioned).

And it's unlikely a hotel or your student lab would actually let you reboot into your own distribution; once you have control of the hardware (which you must have), you practically own it from that moment.

CherryPy is actually a much better solution than yours:

Your lab, and your hotel room, is likely to have a screen that can take VGA or HDMI input - so you've got a display; You can get foldable silicon keyboards for $10 or so, and a small travel mouse for $10 more. So, for $45, you have something you can _already_ use at your lab or hotel room, with no one having to fear you're putting viruses on their system.

1010001015• 15 years ago

A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks.

But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.

Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.

Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.

If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

What it gets you is the ability to give it to a household with a TV, and they can have a computer to play with cheaply.

It's not meant for us, it's meant for people with no computer, or maybe one computer they aren't allowed to (or don't dare to) fiddle with in case they break it. It's for educational use.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

"Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard, mouse."

Why?

rosstafarian2• 15 years ago

This thing does 1080p through hdmi and has a hardware video decoder. An xmbc port is being worked on for it, i plan on getting a few of these and using them as xbmc server's on my hdtv's. Can't beat it for $25/$35 + a few bucks for a 4 gig memory card

dguaraglia• 15 years ago

My thoughts, exactly. That's what I have in mind as my first project with these babies. It's the easiest thing to get right the first time around (as it's mostly playing around with software).

easp4• 15 years ago

You seem to have fixated on the portability. Understandable, but I don't think that is the point. The point is to build a cheap but capable device that kids can hack on. The portability is a byproduct of that focus on cost: the fewer parts, the smaller the PCB, the cheaper it can be.

Keyboards and mice are pretty cheap these days. Monitors, not as much, but this can work with TVs, which are surprisingly common, even in the developing world.

digikata• 15 years ago

If an aspect of this is hackability, I'm wondering if a schematic or a datasheet for the CPU will be released. Under "schematic", in the wiki right now I see a pcb "gerber" layout, and Broadcom isn't one of the more open companies with datasheets. But, I figure they're in a pre-shipping crunch right now, so we'll all wait and see...

yellowbkpk• 15 years ago

Link to actual blog post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/344

joezydeco6• 15 years ago

If they think this PCB is "packed" they haven't looked hard enough at a smartphone teardown. Go look at the iPhone 4S teardown:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2

r00fus• 15 years ago

Difference is the iPhone has insane margins. You want to pay $35 or $100?

joezydeco6• 15 years ago

Judging by how tight some of those discretes are packed on the board, Apple also has some serious pick and place machines.

temp5678• 15 years ago

It's not the PCB that's expensive. It's the components on it.

rosstafarian2• 15 years ago

$100? heh the 16gb 4s is $200(+fees, tax, etc.) because its subsidized with a 2 year contract. I think it's something like $650 if you buy it unlocked. compared to a $25 - $35 computer? Apples and oranges ;)

easp4• 15 years ago

They could have achieved higher density, but it would have been more expensive. The density is in service of low costs, so that wouldn't have made much sense.

ctdonath4• 15 years ago

What's their initial production run going to look like? There's a whole lotta geeks who will want this - and at that price, they'll want 10. ($250 for more computers than I'll know what to do with? I'll take 20!)

polshaw5• 15 years ago

They spoke of 10k initial run.[1] They have also been considering limiting purchases per person.

1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU

DanBC4• 15 years ago

I'm really excited by this project. I think it's a great idea. I very much hope they sell them to anyone, maybe at a slightly higher price to subsidise the others.

But there's a tiny[1] hint of regret that modern programming is necessarily abstracted away from the hardware. When people were using the popular home computers of the 1980s they would be able to use some version of BASIC, and then also some machine code if needed. And that wasn't something just limited to the brightest smartest young programmers; it was above average but nothing extreme. I learnt Z80 ASM on a suitcase instructional computer, turning fans on and off or stepping through traffic light sequences on LEDs. Then I made a resistor ladder DtoA convertor and pushed data out the parallel printer port for audio. (Something also done by No$GB emulator.)

That seems to be something that children will be missing out on, unless this project gives them enough boost to then investigate things like arduino or similar.

[1] Not a criticism in any way of the Raspberry Pi project.

JamesAn• 15 years ago

One of the operating systems that may be ported to the Pi is RISC OS, which includes a reasonably decent implementation of BASIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC) which itself contains a built-in ARM assembler.

A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without needing to download, install and use a compiler.

We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered harmful" sense.

moomin• 15 years ago

Also, if you wanted to learn bare-metal programming, the entire RISC OS Api was defined in terms of assembler. It's not open source, though.

polshaw5• 15 years ago

They are selling them to anyone, these are not another OLPC.

As for programming abstraction; that is a ship that sailed long ago!

knodi• 15 years ago

I can't wait to get few of these.

joshu4• 15 years ago

This is like the best-documented vaporware ever. I hope they prove me wrong soon.

joezydeco6• 15 years ago

What doesn't look legit? The PCB silks look typical, the board size is about right for a small SoC-based design. You just need a lot of space for those large connectors like SD/MMC and HDMI.

There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.

kvermeer• 15 years ago

The part that's suspicious is the $25 price point (the BeagleBoard is $125, the BeagleBone is $90, the Gumstix is $150-$250 depending on configuration). How many products can you name for under $50 (2x the cost of the Raspberry Pi) that approach its specs and capabilities? Also, they're aiming for user-friendliness to the point where it is supposed to be an educational product for young people.

These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets rolling is the shaky part.

Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust to Broadcomm.

joshu4• 15 years ago

The post to shipping ratio is low.

ctdonath4• 15 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the SD card slot.

sneak• 15 years ago

Why don't thes people release their files as they work on them? Why don't they resell the bare SoCs at cost or a slight markup so we can use them for other projects?

Something has always struck me as fishy about this whole thing.

easp4• 15 years ago

Why aren't they doing those things? Perhaps because that isn't what they set out to do:

We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.

How does selling SoCs at cost or a slight markup serve their aims? My guess, it doesn't.

What is fishy about that?

tesseract2• 15 years ago

You couldn't build one yourself anyway, because Broadcom won't sell you parts or even talk to you unless you're doing volumes like 100k/quarter. And then you'll probably need to sign an NDA to get the datasheet.

I see the Raspberry Pi project as an attempt by Broadcom to build some goodwill - but they seem more interested in doing so among society at large by producing a super-affordable computer for kids, than among nerds by doing an open source project. That's Broadcom's prerogative and I applaud what they are doing for what it is.

Personally though, as a hardware hacker, I am more likely to buy similar products using TI (BeagleBoard) or Freescale (Chumby Hacker Board) or Atmel parts, as those manufacturers have histories of being a bit more friendly to hackers, hobbyists, and small volume buyers. The BeagleBoard in particular is open source, there's development chatter on an open mailing list, and TI sells the same OMAP SoCs to small volume customers (right down to the possibility of a hobbyist buying one or two through a distributor, although at that volume you'll pay $50 for just the bare SoC).

polshaw5• 15 years ago

Rasberry Pi is not a project run by broadcom, just using their SoC (and featuring one of their employees). They are selling the first round to nerds / hardware hackers, and I doubt many others will choose to pay 4x the price to keep using the beagleboard.

montecarl• 15 years ago

What would be the best way to interface a 2.5" hard drive with one of these? A USB to sata controller? That seems bulky if you want to have it in one case. I'd like to find a compact way to add some storage to the device as I am interested in using it as a media player.

kennywinker2• 15 years ago

It's got an SD card slot.

winter_blue• 15 years ago

This is quite awesome. I can imagine many great things coming out of this. Such cheap computers, will bring computers (and therefore the internet) within range of many people in developing countries.

One potential problem will be the cost of monitors, which might exceed the cost of the computers itself :-( But hopefully someone can make cheap monitors soon..

Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC

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