I already have enough hardware littering my desk
Who needs Raspberry Pi when practically everyone has an Arm9 development board with 2 lcd's built in, buttons, wifi, L-ion battery & charge cicuit tucked away unloved in a box somewhere in the form of Nintendo DS or at the very least Gameboy SP which uses Arm7, both programmed in c/c++ and can run Linux.
While I agree that the RPi has been a victim of its own hype (which, I admit, I fell for), I would dispute your statement that 'practically everyone' has a DS or SP lying around. I know a large number of people that don't have either, and who would never buy a games console of any sort, but some of them would be interested in the RPi.
It comes for 25 USD to 35 USD and its very very small, does your development board comes in such a low cost?
@dxw00d, Maybe im of the wrong generation, younger developers will be into xbox and ps3's, Im 42 so have grown up with Nintendo's in all forms and so have my kids so i have ended up with their offcast's SP's NDS's & NDSL's, I like Gameboys because the hardwares all there for you in a neat little folding case, all that is needed is a flash cartridge which i also have.
I've had various development platforms over time and i've looked at RPi and can't justify the cost when it will just end up as a paperweight.
If it comes down to it I also have a wireless IP cam which also uses ARM and runs Linux, so we're surrounded by re-useable hardware with is either free or very cheap
@dxw00d, yes an old DS can be picked up for about the same off ebay, the bonus is it already comes with 2 lcd's, wifi, spi, 16bit data bus, buttons, battery, charger and a tidy case
I'm 47, so I'm the same generation as you, and I have owned various Nintendo boxes.
This could easily turn into another of those endless/pointless discussions. You can't justify the cost of a Pi, so don't buy one. I could, and I strongly believe in what the RPi foundation is trying to do (get UK schools to teach more than just MS Office skills).
Same reason why everyone has an iPod and iPhone instead of an Archos. Its all about the marketing. Our group just purchased 8 RPi units, not because we needed them now, but because we will need them in the future, and couldn't guarantee they would still be available.
Although this DS idea sounds interesting. Is there a large developer presence like the RPi, or is it still roll-your-own? Most developers (looking at you, Microsoft) have locked their hardware down so hard, I don't know if anyone will ever make it reusable. The xbox 360 has been out for 8 years, and the only way to free it from its shackles is to find a unit that is 6 years old, has never been connected to the internet, and happens to have a special header on the mainboard. You can then bit-bang it into submission.
@wizdum, The Nintendo dev community is quite large, maybe not as large as the Arduino community has become due to it's excellent speed of prototyping, I even favour atmega over pic's now for their ease of use.
I made a pandora's battery for my psp and downgraded the firmware to run homebrew so nothing is impossible
Im not saying NDS is for everyone but it's a cheap way to get your hands on an Arm9 dev platform to program with c/c++
#include <nds.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
int i;
consoleDemoInit();
videoSetMode(MODE_FB0);
vramSetBankA(VRAM_A_LCD);
printf("Hello World!\n");
printf("www.Drunkencoders.com");
for(i = 0; i < 256 * 192; i++)
VRAM_A[i] = RGB15(31,0,0);
while(1){
swiWaitForVBlank();
}
return 0;
}
P18F4550:
@wizdum, The Nintendo dev community is quite large, maybe not as large as the Arduino community has become due to it's excellent speed of prototyping, I even favour atmega over pic's now for their ease of use.I made a pandora's battery for my psp and downgraded the firmware to run homebrew so nothing is impossible
Im not saying NDS is for everyone but it's a cheap way to get your hands on an Arm9 dev platform to program with c/c++
#include <nds.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
int i;
consoleDemoInit();
videoSetMode(MODE_FB0);
vramSetBankA(VRAM_A_LCD);
printf("Hello World!\n");
printf("www.Drunkencoders.com");
for(i = 0; i < 256 * 192; i++)
VRAM_A[i] = RGB15(31,0,0);
while(1){
swiWaitForVBlank();
}
return 0;
}
I may have finally found a way to justify that C++ course I took at my university!
Our group just purchased 8 RPi units, not because we needed them now, but because we will need them in the future
Look whats happened in the last 12 months and imagine what will arrive in the next 12, can you imagine a quad core inteluino 3ghz blinking an LED, im joking of course, but thats the way things are heading, it seams every few months theres a new must have dev platform
P18F4550:
Our group just purchased 8 RPi units, not because we needed them now, but because we will need them in the future
Look whats happened in the last 12 months and imagine what will arrive in the next 12, can you imagine a quad core inteluino 3ghz blinking an LED, im joking of course, but thats the way things are heading, it seams every few months theres a new must have dev platform
By "future" I meant 4 - 6 weeks. The last batch of RPi's sold out before I could even get to the website. We have projects in the works that will use them, but we wont get full funding for the projects for 4 - 6 weeks, and didn't want to end up needing them and not having them.
The LED thing is funny. One of my friends mentioned that he plans to use his Pi to make an RFID lock for his gun rack. I think my response was something like "I could have built you a $5 Arduino on a Breadboard to do that."
Although I shouldn't say anything, I have a dedicated server with 16gb of ram, 1.5TB hard drive, and dual 2.4ghz Xenon quad-core CPUs. It serves one website, that gets ~50 unique hits per day. I could probably replace it with an Arduino + ethernet shield.
when it came down to it, PI didnt fit my needs, and before I came to that conclusion I would have bought one if it were not for the horrid delay in actually getting the stupid thing ... which is good cause I learned of all its downsides before going gun-ho
I have a "first run" RPi and I have found many uses for it as a low power (about 1 watt) headless Linux controller. Running headless you can communicate with it over ssh either with a FTDI UART connection or over the built-in 100mbps wired or USB dongle wireless internet adapters. It is much more capable than any Arduino or PIC for general computation particularly if you need floating or fixed point. The graphics engine can decode Full HD 40Mbps Blu-ray in real time. It is also a fine platform for soft real time use, with analog (A/D) and even PWM. Because it's Linux, you get USB, wireless ethernet and BT, a real file system, robust ethernet networking with SSH/SSL, standard Linux apps, the command line, etc., all without doing any work. It supports SSH/SSL encryption, which Wiznet devices don't do, or at least didn't do when I looked at them a year ago. It even has decent stereo audio which, as LadyAda mentioned on the AdaFruit website, is surprisingly difficult to do on a MCU board at low cost.
For apps that don't require PC-style I/O, the RPi is not a great choice. It's not as good as an Arduino for real time like PWM and such, it has a weird undocumented SOC, and the SD card is dog slow. But for remote sensing / logging / wireless ethernet where you need to process the signal, at $35 it can't be beat. Let's put that into perspective. An Arduino Uno R3 + Ethernet Shield is $75, and an Arduino Uno Ethernet board is $65. I think it would be a challenge to even build an Arduino Uno Ethernet on a homebrew PCB for $35.
I think the closest community supported competitor to the Pi in the market now is the BeagleBone. It has similar memory and performance, but it has a fully documented ARM 7 (TI AM3359 A8 SOC), no "chip on chip" issues, and most every I/O type you could want. It accepts expansion shields ("capes") of which perhaps 10 are already in production and many more on the way. But it is a different class of device, much like the ARM7 boards someone mentioned earlier. At $89 it costs 2.5x as much as RPi, and it uses more than twice as much power.
RPi is not going to replace Arduino or BeagleBone, and it's not going to replace a PC either. But for me at least this is an extraordinarily useful board at a throwaway price. I think it will also meet its original goal of giving kids something they can hack, at a price that won't break Mom and Dad's budget. I agree it is a victim of its own hype, but I think that will soon abate as people figure out what it is actually capable of.