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Raspberry Pi demos $25 PC running 1080p video, promises CD-quality audio
- ajays 15y agoMan, I'd love to get my hands on one. I have an Airport Express right now for streaming music from my Linux box to my home theater system, but it's just not working out. All I need is a Linux-supporting little toy like this with audio out and WiFi (and which can decompress an MP3 in realtime).
- RexRollman 15y agoIf I had one, it would probably just end up putting Linux on it with MPD, which I could then be remotely control via mpc or ncmpc. But the biggest problem for me would be figuring out what to do with the board itself. I've built PCs before but I wouldn't know what to put this board into or the best way to power it. And, of course, I would also have to overcome my lack of familiarity with ARM.
- 0x12 15y agoThis thing will sell like hotcakes if they can keep the pricepoint the way it is now.
- wccrawford 15y agoIF they can, it's going to make a lot of waves. IF.
- liz_upton 15y agoWe definitely can. Our BOM comes in well under the planned selling price, and we're totally confident of hitting the $25/$35 price points.
- 0x12 15y agoVery impressive, really. Will you be offering quantum discounts?
- trafficlight 15y agoThat's really incredible.
- liz_upton 15y agoWe're selling too close to cost to make any discounts workable, but we can discount on shipping if people buy lots in one go.
- 0x12 15y agoThat's actually quite scary. If you sell 'close to cost' then your margins are going to be razor thin even with just a little overhead it might not be viable. Beware of selling too cheap.
- baxter 15y agoAFAICT they are a registered charity with the goal of promoting computer science education, so I suspect large profit margins matter less than if they were a business.
- sciurus 15y agoThey don't need large profit margins, but they should try to have enough for an office and staff.
- wccrawford 15y agoProfit is what you have after paying for costs, including staff.
- sitkack 15y agoI think they should increase the single unit cost to $45 or higher (49 or 63). Have it a vote on the main page so people feel like they have some input, the higher cost can support discounts for bulk buys and other non-profits (think give one get one). Explain the rational for the price increase on the poll. The geeks that are making single purchases can definitely pay the higher price. Have a discount kick in @ qty 10 or 20 (down to $35). The at cost (which is never really @ cost, ever) discount shouldn't kick in till either non-profit status or qty 100. ---- You are going to have a problem meeting demand. And some for profit shop is going to use these as digital signage and suck up all the supply. Beware of unintended consequences, everyone that buys them isn't going to be doing good in the world. Capitalism is faceless and cares about us much gravity or water. ---- Another option is to have a classroom in a box package where you sell 30, power supplies, keyboards and an app that runs on all operating systems so you can DD pre-canned images onto end user supplied SD cards (point them at preferred cards on newegg).
- pingswept 15y agoIt looks like the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually Broadcom. There's a Broadcom logo on their board, and this Eben Upton fellow appears to work for Broadcom: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton My hunch is that they'll hit the low price point by selling it at a loss, with the expectation that it will be worth it in the long run as a marketing effort for Broadcom. That seems a little skeezy to me. On the other hand, there could be a lot worse marketing efforts than flooding schools with cheap Linux boards. [Edit: see response below from liz_upton, who convinces me I'm wrong. I do still think it's weird that they're "having a hell of a time" distinguishing themselves from Broadcom, but haven't tried removing the Broadcom logo from their product yet. If I were really a conspiracy theorist, I would point out the Broadcom logo is a sinc function, and the integral of sinc is pi. But that would be crazy!]
- liz_upton 15y agoThe Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity. Our director does work for Broadcom, which meant that we were able to get a foot in the door to discuss buying chips from them in much smaller numbers than they're usually prepared to sell people (their normal sales to a single customer are in the tens of millions range) once we'd explained the aims of the charity. They did allow to use their parts library to make the alpha boards which you can see in the video. Outside that, we're not receiving any other help from them (we source all our own parts for the final boards). All of us have day jobs and are doing all our Raspberry Pi work on a volunteer basis because we believe it's a project that can make a real difference. (I'm volunteering full-time - I'm freelance, so I've been able to put other work aside for at least the rest of the year.) We're not selling at a loss. This isn't a Broadcom marketing exercise. Our relationship with Broadcom is one of customer/supplier - and that's it.
- Wistar 15y agoI think that at even three times the price it will sell, at least like waffles.
- Sapient 15y agoThe geek in me completely agrees with you. But I also think that would miss the point of this being a charitable enterprise entirely.
- tesseract 15y agoExactly. The computing power and, if I had to guess, the bill-of-materials cost is probably roughly equal to an Apple TV. The difference is that Apple has a traditional retail markup whereas it sounds like Raspberry Pi, being a charity, will be selling their product only barely above cost.
- Pahalial 15y ago1080p video with sound only recently improved from "FM radio" quality - what a strange combination.
- th0ma5 15y agoYou made me think about how audio has been generally far ahead of its technical development, so in theory maybe this just means that 44.1k 16-bit PCM is so ubiquitous and good enough that it is considered a pinnacle even though options that are better exists. I love my 192 kHz sample rate on my device, but admittedly this is for audio recording and ham radio, so, almost a scientific instrument really.
- stcredzero 15y agoA $25 platform for scientific instruments would have tremendous benefits!
- liz_upton 15y agoThe article doesn't mention the HDMI sound, which was always high quality. The upgraded audio is from the 3.5mm jack, which means you can now run two high-quality streams at once - something that some people have been requesting.
- jodrellblank 15y agoPromoting a cheap computer for education/learning by demonstrating it playing Quake 3 and 1080p video - what a strange combination.
- sitkack 15y agoSo it is capable of immersive 3d and high resolution video of fluid flow. Not strange at all.
- zokier 15y agoMy feelings exactly when reading the title. "CD quality" was great in the 80's and good in 90's. In 2010's it's certainly no high standard.
- Jabbles 15y agoThis is fantastic, but "1080p" can have a dramatic range of qualities. If Inglorious Bastards just fits on the 2GB card and is over 2 hours long then the bitrate will be around 2Mbit/s, which is probably not very good. (cf. ~25Mbit/s for BluRay). I should also point out that depending on the quality of the encoder, the bitrate is also a bad way of measuring quality. But I believe it is more useful than just saying "1080p". http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+gigabytes+%2F+Inglourious+Bastards+runtime http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+gigabytes+%2F+Inglour...
- mikeryan 15y agoDamn you beat me too it. Also its not even actually 1080p that video looks to be running in 2.40:1 (movie aspect ratio) so the height isn't taking up all the screen real-estate.
- liz_upton 15y agoIt is full 1080p, but that clip doesn't have content to the edge of the video frame, so you're seeing black bars at either side (which we are decoding, for what it matters!)
- mikeryan 15y agoI may totally be missing something but 1080px should be the height. So if you're showing it at a movie resolution you're either at something like 2592x1080 which is actually better then 1080p (but kind of unlikely - very few monitors would support a screen res that high) or you're running at something like 1920x800 which is less then 1080. Its still pretty slick, not sure what SOC you're using but for that kind of media playback it seems to be something in line with what we're seeing in a bunch of our Connected TVs
- etherealG 15y agousually videos from actual film are a lower (or higher) aspect ratio that the resolution of the monitor. in the 1080p case most often you get less than the full height since it was recorded that way. p.s. their platform support decoding full 1080p, that demo just included less height.
- oacgnol 15y agoThe Raspberry Pi sounds cool in concept. I should hope that the demo is unoptimized for now, perhaps the ceiling for the hardware is higher than we anticipate.
- liz_upton 15y agoWe're definitely not done with optimisation, which is why we're not launching right-now-this-minute. You'll be seeing improvements, which we'll be blogging about (we think development's fascinating, and that it's good for people to have a glimpse about what's involved with putting this sort of thing together) all the way up until we launch.
- oacgnol 15y agoCount me excited. I'd love to see what the open source community can do to max out the hardware.
- 0x12 15y agoIt's way past the 'concept' stage, they've got 50 boards up and running and there are tons of people that would fork over cash today to get themselves one or more of these.
- adrianinaustin 15y agoshut up and take my money!
- tobiasu 15y agoSo, Mr. Upton, what are your plans regarding making the SoC datasheet available for real hackers? (Not that I have any hope that Broadcom would change its ways...)
- digikata 15y agoI wonder about this too. Having the full technical documentation for the board, schematics, datasheets, etc. would seem to best serve the mentioned educational goals as well as giving you a wider open source audience which should help with ongoing development and maintenance.
- teach 15y agoI suspect Liz Upton is female.
- jodrellblank 15y agoI suspect the comment was addressed openly to this guy: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?author=1 http://www.raspberrypi.org/?author=1
- steverb 15y agoI teach middle school programming/computer classes. I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these. Right now it's cheap enough that I can tell the parents to buy one for their kids without a problem, and out of pocket it for those few of my students whose parents won't be able to afford it. Then I can finally not have to deal with the full lockdown the school has on their PC lab.
- xyzzyz 15y agoWhat about input and display devices? Although school can afford buying some cheap keyboards, the displays are much more expensive and it's pretty hard to work without them.
- ConstantineXVI 15y agoI think the idea is that they're cheap enough to give to students to use at home, who can hook them up to TVs they already have
- xyzzyz 15y agoKids don't have PCs to learn, but their parents have HD TV? Is USA really like this?
- oiuyhgthjk 15y agoThe family have PCs - but they are running windows, and anti-virus and firewalls and their cable company internet subscription - if the kid messes them up the family is annoyed.
- ctdonath 15y agoThis lets the kids have their own PC to work on without any risk of screwing up the family PC, and at a trivial cost. Installing programming tools on whatever PC the parents may have is not a reliable, trivial, or consistent process. Parents will be upset if it somehow the installation screws up the home computer. And yes, for some households with limited income, they may have enough money for an HDTV _or_ a PC, but not both - and most households will have opted for the HDTV before the need for an adequate PC for classwork became an issue.
- Kilimanjaro 15y agoLove the project, just one question: why $25 and not $95? Seems to me you're leaving $70 on the table for no apparent reason.
- regomodo 15y agoIt's being developed by a non-profit foundation.
- joeyespo 15y agoBecause it's the price of a textboox. http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-a-25-pc-because-its-the-price-of-a-textbook-2011091/ http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-a-25-pc-because-its-t...
- burgerbrain 15y agoI wonder what textbooks cost only $25. In my experience they start at at least $50. As in, a book that would normally cost about $25 suddenly gets at least $25 slapped onto it the moment publishers realize it's being used as a text book (you can see this quite readily in CS/tech books with equivalent binding). The second publishers realize they have a captive audience they jack the price.
- qxb 15y agoAs I said in a previous Raspberry Pi thread[0], the comparison is supposed to be with high / school school textbooks, not college ones. School textbooks are cheaper than those used at university. Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1] $25 (roughly £15 at current rates) is a good rough price for a school textbook in the UK. A quick Amazon search shows this.[2] Bear in mind, too, that the product is aimed in part at developing countries, where school textbooks may be cheaper. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949932 [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2 http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2 [2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/school-textbooks-Books/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3ASchool%20Textbooks&page=1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/school-textbooks-Books/s?ie=UTF8&...
- patrickod 15y agoI will most definitely buy one of these boards when they come out if even just to support the charity. That said I'm sure such a small functioning computer would no doubt come in handy down the road as well.
- RexRollman 15y agoDoes anyone know if either OpenBSD or NetBSD has been tried with this hardware yet? I didn't see any mention of it on the website, unless I simply overlooked it.
- bane 15y agoI'm extremely excited about this project. Quick question: does anybody know if the foundation is planning on coordinating lesson plans, source code that people build for this, etc. I think starting an entire community around this could be great. I'm reminded of the fantastic community that surrounds TI calculators/MSX Computers/Amiga Computers/Atari STs etc.. See http://www.ticalc.org/ http://www.ticalc.org/ as an example
- ErrantX 15y agoBrilliant.. I'm smiling. And will definitely be buying a few as soon as I can get my hands on them - plenty of educational and home uses spring to mind! The especially nice thing is that last week when Raspberry Pi were mentioned here (a couple of times) there were some quite legitimate comments along the lines of "we've heard of the low cost PC before.. but they are all vapourware". So it is great to see a product that is all but on the market :)
- gravitronic 15y agoLooks like there will be another user of this SoC coming to market relatively soon, from the original Microsoft Xbox hacker "bunnie": The NeTV has a particularly high hack-value due to its integration of an FPGA; from the hacker’s perspective, it’s a cousin to the Rasberry Pi but with integrated wifi, HDMI pass-through and an FPGA. And a shiny plastic case for those who care about that! http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1847 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1847 Maybe by "cousin" he means similar market and actually a different SoC. Either way depending on price point it may be what the "hardcore" hacker crowd is hoping to get from the raspberry pi (whose target is more an introduction to computing / computer science)
- wmf 15y agoThe NeTV uses a Marvell SoC, so you're right that it's a somewhat distant cousin.
- nl 15y agoThis looks really interesting. It appears to be designed specifically to do HDMI passthough, with the idea you run apps on top of video that is passing through the device (or that's how I read it anyway). Combine that with the FPGA... I can imagine some really nice apps.
- ljf 15y agoI am really looking forward to this - if only as a tool to use with the old CRT TVs I have lying around! Also I wonder if there will be a $30-$50 dollar one that includes fully donating one (buy one give one) or any percentage along that route. That said I'm sure there will be no end of charitable groups who will be raising money to by these for groups and schools.