I really like the idea of a lamp stack i can stick in a progect box with an arduino. But most I read about the PI is less than flattering.
Anybody have experience with the current crop of them? Happy? pile of crap?
There was that gumstick linux out for awhile and it just didnt have the nads to run lamp, hacking old routers just doesnt get you to a sellable product so im thinking this PI would be sweet.
Or anybody have any other suggestions for a sub $80 device capable of wireless and LAMP? (old Dells from Ebay dont count ;))
Have you looked into embedded PC hardware? In single units, you probably won't get your price, but in larger numbers, you might? Here are a couple of sources (among many):
You'll want to look into things like Nano-ITX and similar (though Mini-ITX is pretty small, and fairly inexpensive - but much larger than what you are probably looking for).
Yea they arent in the budget. I can still get wrt54gs for in the $60 range and dont want to go much if any higher than that for a replacement.
I'm thinking for $35 what the hell. I'll just buy one, wait 3 months to get it, and then test it out.
I haven't tried the new distro with the floating point fix, but the original distro was pretty painful. Really though, if your workload can't be accelerated by the GPU, it's going to be seriously slow. At least a LAMP stack wouldn't need a GUI, but the lack of memory, coupled with swapping to an SD card, might still be a problem. If you are running headless, you should be able to alter the CPU/GPU memory split in favour of the CPU, I believe.
Mine has basically sat in its box, since I saw how slow it was. Might be time for another go with the new distro, or maybe RiscOS, or just give up and put XBMC on it - at least that can be accelerated.
What is "lamp", other than 'a search term nearly as useless as "processing"'?
What is "lamp", other than 'a search term nearly as useless as "processing"'?
I disagree - "Processing" in Google gives processing.org as the first hit.
"Lamp stack" similarly gets a direct hit.
Personally, I prefer my acronyms capitalised.
I wrote a bit about my recent encounter with a Pi here:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,94386.135.html
(thread in this sub-forum, reply 138, p10).
I think sub-$80 it may be the only game in town, for now.
But I can't see that lasting.
Someone got a look at this?
Well Linux sucks for doing anything remotely real time.
The Rasbain release is much better than what proceeded it. But at the end of the day it is still Linux.
RISC OS is looking very promising although it is still in alpha. I think this could be the best compromise for an OS that doesn't get in the way too much.
However it is still early days, my projects so far:-
http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Raspberry/Punnet.html
Well Linux sucks for doing anything remotely real time.
That's a pretty sweeping generalisation.
RedHawk from Concurrent is pretty handy for RT.
That Aria looks interesting but I can see no mention of how you connect to the "pins". They have many Fritzing-like wiring examples but how do you actually connect wires?
Rob
Grumpy_Mike:
Well Linux sucks for doing anything remotely real time.
Some people realize that we should write kernel-mode drivers for real-time tasks and reserve app-mode for user-interface code. Some even go as far as creating successfull products and businesses. Others patch the standard distro and reconfigure the kernel for RT app-mode support when separation of RT and UI is not required/desired. Then, others again claim to their ignorance and spend their life waiting for the next big thing.
@greynomad
they have a so called "terra" board that is quite huge. I do'nt know if they make available some more compact breakout board.
Yes I see. It seems that the entire board is actually treated as an SMD device a bit like some RF modules.
Different.
Rob
Then, others again claim to their ignorance and spend their life waiting for the next big thing.
And yet other people talk through their back side.
I called them. The next week they ll make available a minimal breakout board with ethernet power usb and connectors. Others are expected by third parties
EDIT end of september ....
Well if you want break out boards or projects. This is what I have been doing while waiting for the next big thing:-
http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Raspberry/Buffer_Board.html
These are all just good toys for us to play with 
The Pi is (as Mike says) pretty poor at anything real-time with Linux. The timing even makes a servo pretty jumpy (Dr. Monk's DIY Electronics Blog: Raspberry Pi GPIO driving Servo).
It also draws 500mA about 10x that of an Arduino Uno.
BUT. Its fun, and its a challenge, seeing just what it can do!
I meant to also add, here are some of the things I have been doing.
More experiments than projects. Dr. Monk's DIY Electronics Blog: raspberry pi
Si.