bill2009:
As a christmas gift I'd like to get a relative either a due or a raspberry pi but everywhere I look seems to be back ordered. Are these actually available or are they just trickling out?I'm in Canada by the way.
I suspect they are just very popular. If the intention is to get an embedded arm processor to your relative, you might consider the Teensy 3.0, which just exited the kickstarter stage, and is now available for purchase directly. Teensy 3.0 uses a modified Arduino IDE that is available from the site. I have the Teensy 3.0, and for the simple things I've tried it works once I got past the quirks*. Some links include:
- Board itself: PJRC Store
- Board with pins soldered on it: PJRC Store
- Teensy forum: http://forum.pjrc.com/forum.php
- Original kickstarter campaign for Teensy 3.0: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulstoffregen/teensy-30-32-bit-arm-cortex-m4-usable-in-arduino-a?ref=category
- The quirks I have are based on my using Linux as a development platform. I can't have certain USB devices plugged into the machine when I want to download the image. On my laptop, I have to unplug the UPS connection. On my desktop, my PS/2 -> USB converter for the keyboard/mouse are problematical, and eventually I need to replace the keyboard/mouse with USB versions.
Mbed is another embedded arm board that you can buy at various distributors (so, it would be similar to the Teensy 3.0 or Due). It has its own development IDE. http://mbed.org/
Beaglebone is more of a full linux board, and so would be similar to the Rasberry pi: http://beagleboard.org/