Anyone Wanting to Try Rasberry Pi ?

I'm kind of annoyed at the choice of a broadcom chip

This is because the guy who's baby this is works for broadcom.

Ok, what other ARM+GPU could they have used that has an open GPU datasheet?

Well the ST one for starters.

Its got a lot of publicity because the Beeb picked up on it and its parallels to the BBC micro 30 years ago. I can't see GM being over impressed given his experience with said 30 year old computer.... :wink:

When the final crush dies off we have a "need" for 3 here as my first order. Even as a basic PVR and internet TV upgrade for old TVs out of the blocks RPi has a lot of potential. And as others have said, it's an awful lot of capability at very near the Arduino price point. I also have some old PIII hardware running Linux about the place currently for light duties and tinkering that can hopefully be retired and reduce our power consumption (and the heat in this room!).

Beaglebone and others are interesting, but the price point of RPi will I'm certain make a lot of people try it out and that can only be good for Arduino (at least in the short term) and hobby electronics overall. In the longer view, if the Raspberry Pi foundation can execute, and if the platform can live up to most of the initial hype, and once the RPi community grows and the ecosystem matures, Arduino could well become the remote sensing/hardware interface card of choice for RPi. It will certainly shake things up.

As for the choice of Broadcom, they used what they were familiar with and a company they had close ties to. That sounds sensible to me. Remember too, that we're not the ultimate target demographic.

I hope they can pull it off,
Geoff

To be fair the first Raspberry Pi prototypes didn't use Broadcom chips. They used... (wait for it) ...an ATmega! Yes, the first RPi was just a big Arduino. How about that.

Well the ST one for starters.

ST has an ARM with a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)?
Note that the ARM11 used in RPi is quite a different beast than the Cortex M0/M3/M4 parts that are usually aimed at microcontroller replacement. ARM11s are aimed at unix-running (and similar OSes) "appliances" like cell phones, cable TV boxes, Digital Video Recorders/players. and stuff like that. ARM11 is a little obsolete (the Cortex A8, as used in beagleBoard, is its nominal replacement, I think.) But that also means that it's "mature" and companies like Broadcom have those lovely System-On-a-Chip (SOC) chips with all sorts of large-system peripherals (GPU, MMU, DRAM controller, USB host, etc.)

Grumpy_Mike:

Ok, what other ARM+GPU could they have used that has an open GPU datasheet?

Well the ST one for starters.

I can't find an ST ARM with a GPU on ST's site http://www.st.com/internet/mcu/class/1734.jsp.

As far as I know, all of the ARMs with GPUs are locked down and under NDA. It's not a good situation but it's where we're at at the moment.

ARM does have a standard GPU, don't they? Neon?

I think the bit about RP being used for educational purposes (vs. a PC or VM of Linux) is that you can outfit a classroom with RPs, KBs, mice, and cheap TVs for a bit less money than a room full of computers. Especially when you consider maintenance costs.

It'll also work for the DIY crowd, because it's a fairly complete mini-PC platform -- even the Linux distro is usable out of the box, with the provided images. That removes quite a bit of the uncertainty for those less than familiar with hardware and Linux to get to the point where they can follow online walkthroughs with a minimum of effort. The exception being DVR and IPTV use. Without MPEG2 licenses (read: support), it's useless. (Anyone here dealing strictly with VC-1/AVC yet? Not me.) And I don't think a 700MHz ARM has any hope of handling it in software.

As a hacker's toy, this is not the ideal platform. Sorry, but unless you can get down to the silicon level, it's still a black box. That rubs against the grain for me, especially when it's touted as the ultimate experimenters kit. Look, either I'm allowed to take it apart or I'm not. This halfsees stuff doesn't cut it. Sure, you can peek under the hood, but you're confined to running compatible kernels because someone doesn't want to give away their trade secrets. Fine. Then it is what it is, and (IMO) what it is, isn't for hackers.

But, I think dhunt hit it on the head... What alternatives are there for full-featured GPUs? Technology at this level is just always encumbered by patents. Frustrating how much further a community could take a technology if there weren't always legal roadblocks in the way.

Ill tell you now, typing 80 column text or anything higher resolution on a cheap composite TV will drive you away in about 20 seconds, so replace cheap TV with couple hundred dollar HDMI enabled HD TV

Cause I myself went though oh about 5 composite TV's over the last 2 years before finding one that actually useable, and its been out of production for a decade

Thats my biggest beef, no VGA or even DVI

DVI to HDMI (or visa versa) adapter ($5 bucks, problem solved) .. or even HDMI to VGA (if they're around)

HDMI to DVI is cheap and easy since they are both digital. HDMI to VGA is much more difficult and expensive since VGA is analogue. I can see their point that 'VGA is end of life' but the trouble is VGA has been 'end of life' for over a decade, it just refuses to lie down and die. It would make the Pi much more expensive to put VGA on it, and previous posters are right. the analogue composite video option is basically c**p. I have an old 4:3 aspect monitor sat under my bench that has DVI, so that'll do me. Ultimately it'll be controlled by SSH, so the display won't matter.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DVI-MALE-HDMI-FEMALE-ADAPTER-CONNECTOR-CONVERTER-/270890136395?pt=UK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL&hash=item3f124f734b#ht_3051wt_1141

VGA is much more difficult and expensive since VGA is analogue.

so is composite, so they are taking a RGB space and squashing it down to a color burst and sync's all on one wire, seems more trouble unless the chip just wont do a vga signal

I can see their point that 'VGA is end of life'

yea and composite has been on the chopping block since the early 90's with SVIDEO and SCART, it just seems to be a very odd choice for a computer system other than media playback on a SDTV, and even then it could be better with the above outputs

shrug

a very odd choice

What "choice"? You're probably talking about Broadcom-provided SoC originally designed for digital settop boxes, so HDMI was probably already there (complete with content security features demanded by the main customers) (and VGA wasn't.)

Its cheap because its little more than the Broadcomm SOC, so if the SOC does it, the Pi does it. Think video streaming box and it being plugged into a modern telly which is what it was designed for. The cheap educational computer bit is a sideline..........

Can't wait for the eBay flood of Pi to begin. Loads of people without a clue will have ordered one and they'll either hit the desk draw or the bay :smiley:

Well yeah lots of people will buy one for the simplicity and never touch it again, which could ultimately be it's down fall, too many people who really have no clue just buying it for price and oh that's cool, shame I have no idea about any of it, and i'm hoping some of them will learn how to use it, but buying one of these to get kids programming just can't see it happening personally.

but buying one of these to get kids programming just can't see it happening personally.

The problem is that a lot of teachers in UK schools are quite poor at the subject they are supposed to teach and many will not let the kids have exposure to something they don't understand on their machines in case they "break" them.
Otherwise Processing would fill the bill nicely.

With the Pi they can isolate programming kids from their expensive machines.

I doubt you could break the machine if you gave the kids VB to use... and if they could i'd be interested how lol

That is precisely not the point. The teachers THINK they can break it. I said they were poor.