Raspbery Pi

[Nicephorus]

Have you seen the Raspberry Pi? For $35, you get a credit card sized computer. It's really bare bones, you need to supply an SD card for memory, USB powersource, keyboard, and monitor/TV - but many people have those lying around. It doesn't even have a case. Only 256 mb ram. But it apparently has twice the performance of most smart phones for most computing tasks. Of course, it's designed for Linux or the operating system would cost more than it.

The intent was to make computers more widely available so that kids can learn programming by actually screwing around nstead of just in classes. In that regard, the impact might be greater outside the U.S. as most kids with an environment to encourage programming already have some kind of computer. But for most Americans, it's semi-disposable so you could try things you wouldn't with a thousand dollar machine.

But I'm curious how this will impact computing and smart systems in general. How much does it cost to develop and manufacture specialized circuit boards? It might be cheaper to buy a few thousand of these for some devices and adapt them. Woudln't it be cool if most smart devices had the exact same guts running them? Adapting and combining would be much simpler.

There's already a huge backlog of orders but I'll probably order one in a few months if they don't turn out to be all flash and no substance. I hope their plan pans out.

Here's their faq:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

[Bishop]

I might look into a couple of those. Hook a credit card up to my TV to fuck around with Linux. Hmm......

[3278]

Have you seen the Raspberry Pi?

There are several applications I've thought of for one, although in a lot of cases an Arduino would accomplish the same goals. Still, I'll probably end up with a couple; if I can get the right [weatherproof] case, I might even install one in my Jeep.

But it apparently has twice the performance of most smart phones for most computing tasks.

It's such a weird computing platform. The SoC is an ARM11, which is the same chip that was in the iPhone 3G, the Zune HD, the Kindle 2, and about a zillion other things: it's a smartphone SoC, so you figure it's like a Pentium 2, which, ten years ago when it was released, was quite something, but which now is a little underwhelming by desktop standards. And yet it can play full HD video, decoding and all. For my part, it's okay if it runs like a P2: I liked my P2.

In any case, for people like me who have been asking for smartphone power that I can control - my Droid is very nice, but I can't do anything with it - it's ideal. And really cheap.

How much does it cost to develop and manufacture specialized circuit boards?

Less than you'd think, more than I'd like. If you're doing runs in the thousands, per-unit costs come way down.

It might be cheaper to buy a few thousand of these for some devices and adapt them.

In some situations, maybe, like if you wanted something massively parallel but ARM-based for some reason. People used to make clusters out of Xboxes, which is about what this is, in terms of power. That said, if you're buying in the "few thousands," you're probably going to be better off rolling your own, or just buying an actual computer.

Woudln't it be cool if most smart devices had the exact same guts running them?

SoCs are as general-purpose as they can be, but even in smartphones you'll see two different members of the same family with different architectures; not all SoCs do all things equally well, and they probably never will, so we'll always rely on a patchwork of general-purpose and specific-purpose devices and systems. I'd love to be able to build a smartphone the way I can build a computer - seriously, I'd kill, like, dozens of dudes - but Lego just doesn't work at this scale. Wish it did.

[3278]

And another slight delay.

[Raygun]

Neat. This'll be fun to play with.

[sinsual]

Hrm...wonder how difficult it would be to make a MicroSquirt DIY fuel injection computer out of one...

[UncleJoseph]

I was thinking about these today...it'd be interesting to have a system of some type (say an aircraft or space craft or car, etc.) that, instead of using one dedicated central brain, used several of these smaller computers, dedicated to a few specific tasks. For space craft or large-scale systems, this type of multi-cpu "brain" could provide an interesting level of redundancy. In systems that need to be extremely reliable, you could have multiple modules providing a specific service that, while connected to other modules, would not be completely dependent upon the network as a whole. The self-contained nature of a Pi could provide a certain "isolation" from other subsystems, thereby preventing system-wide catastrophic failures. I see this particularly useful for applications involving safety controls, life support, etc. Of course, an argument could be made that this type of system would be less efficient, but I would argue the opposite. Smaller, dedicated processors can do their jobs much more efficiently. Further, the modular nature of these types of controller processors means that other subsystems are less-affected by taking other systems offline and can run independently of other system failures, or down-times.