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Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoCool. Portable. Cheap. Can run Quake II. But what does that get you? Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard, mouse. So you can only use it where those things are. For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer. That would be portable. Useful for a student lab, at my Mom's house, in a hotel. Just a thought.
- eugenejen 15y agoI want to use them as cheap embedded systems that without KVM.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoRight, that's the primary use in my mind. Not gonna be much use to a primary school student.
- gravitronic 15y agoIt will be all in the software. Make this thing boot into a python IDE with pygame installed and you have this generation's QBASIC.
- tlear 15y agoI would prefer lua, but completely agree I am buying one for every kid of every relative or friend of mine age 3+
- ctdonath 15y agoAu contraire, it's perfect for kids. First off (as a parent of two toddlers) it's CHEAP; if a kid manages to destroy it (the little entropy generators kids are), so what - get another. Next, it starts so simple (and CHEAP) that you'll have no qualms about running simple cheap software on it. Then, you'll think nothing of putting money into a computer for any/all TV in the house (I'm waffling about a Mac Mini, but a RasberryPi is a no-brainer). So there's an easy, cheap, nigh-unto-disposable (we're talking kids here) computer that can run powerful stuff yet you'll have no qualms about devoting to a young mind. BTW: I started programming in 4th grade, with printing terminals and acoustic-coupled dial-up mainframes. A few years later I had a then-equivalent of the RasberryPi: Dad soldered together a $100 Sinclair ZX-80 (likewise, the screen was your TV), and I programmed that thing darn near non-stop. Heck yeah the RasberryPi is "gonna be much use to a primary school student". Can't wait to get my kids going on it.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoSounds idyllic; but what are you going to run? The latest Office suite? Photoshop? Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power. So, we're talking about teaching kids to use some special kid-computer with software/tools they will never encounter ever again. What tools are these? A BASIC interpreter?
- vidarh 15y ago> Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power. Linux costs 0, and runs on far less capable devices than the RaspberryPi.
- colomon 15y agoAnd is already ported: "What Linux distros will be supported at launch? Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux will be supported from the start." (Raspberry Pi FAQ)
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoSo, Photoshop for linux? Mac dev tools? What apps?
- vidarh 15y agoWhy don't you go look up Linux, that way I don't have to list tens of thousands of applications, including dozens of language implementations. If you want someone to learn software development, or computing in general, Linux is a far better starting point than Windows or OS X.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoYeah, yeah. Lots of open-source half-baked projects with no support and incomplete features. Advertised as "photoshop replacement" or "complete IDE" but turns out, missing critical features, crash right and left, won't work on modern hardware etc etc. Been down that road, burned more times than I can count. I wish it were true, but I don't fool myself into believing it.
- nitrogen 15y agoI bought my first PC when I was eight (at a very discounted price from my parents). I already knew how to do trivial graphics programs in Logo. I had a "100 in one" electronics kit as well, but didn't have anyone to teach me how to read schematics. So, I got the example circuits running by following the numbered wiring sequences printed below the schematic. I learned how to use DOS before that by watching the output of my parents' first computer as it ran through AUTOEXEC.BAT (I was insanely excited when I typed "prompt SpSg" into a command line and the computer actually did something -- later on I figured out that the S should have been a $). By the time I was 13 I was buying scrap computer parts, assembling working computers, and selling them. Don't underestimate the potential of children.
- codedivine 15y agoWell, I think the idea is that you will plug it into a TV that you probably already have in the house. Thus both the HDMI port and composite TV-out. Keyboard and mouse still will be required though.
- andyking 15y agoRather like some of the early, low-cost home computers which came out of Cambridge in the 1980s; see ZX Spectrum. It almost feels like history coming back on itself.
- burgerbrain 15y ago"Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard, mouse." Why?
- gps408 15y agoIt can run Quake III. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI
- beagle3 15y ago> For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any computer, and it boots as my computer. Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9 years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the same one, if properly partitioned). And it's unlikely a hotel or your student lab would actually let you reboot into your own distribution; once you have control of the hardware (which you must have), you practically own it from that moment. CherryPy is actually a much better solution than yours: Your lab, and your hotel room, is likely to have a screen that can take VGA or HDMI input - so you've got a display; You can get foldable silicon keyboards for $10 or so, and a small travel mouse for $10 more. So, for $45, you have something you can _already_ use at your lab or hotel room, with no one having to fear you're putting viruses on their system.
- 101000101 15y agoA comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks. But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion. Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks. Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue. If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.
- DanBC 15y agouh, you can run other OSs on Apple hardware. It's a little bit trickier because of EFI but it's not hard. What you can't do (Apple say) is run Apple OSs on non-Apple hardware.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jodrellblank 15y agoWhat it gets you is the ability to give it to a household with a TV, and they can have a computer to play with cheaply. It's not meant for us, it's meant for people with no computer, or maybe one computer they aren't allowed to (or don't dare to) fiddle with in case they break it. It's for educational use.
- rosstafarian 15y agoThis thing does 1080p through hdmi and has a hardware video decoder. An xmbc port is being worked on for it, i plan on getting a few of these and using them as xbmc server's on my hdtv's. Can't beat it for $25/$35 + a few bucks for a 4 gig memory card
- dguaraglia 15y agoMy thoughts, exactly. That's what I have in mind as my first project with these babies. It's the easiest thing to get right the first time around (as it's mostly playing around with software).
- easp 15y agoYou seem to have fixated on the portability. Understandable, but I don't think that is the point. The point is to build a cheap but capable device that kids can hack on. The portability is a byproduct of that focus on cost: the fewer parts, the smaller the PCB, the cheaper it can be. Keyboards and mice are pretty cheap these days. Monitors, not as much, but this can work with TVs, which are surprisingly common, even in the developing world.
- digikata 15y agoIf an aspect of this is hackability, I'm wondering if a schematic or a datasheet for the CPU will be released. Under "schematic", in the wiki right now I see a pcb "gerber" layout, and Broadcom isn't one of the more open companies with datasheets. But, I figure they're in a pre-shipping crunch right now, so we'll all wait and see...
- yellowbkpk 15y agoLink to actual blog post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/344 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/344
- joezydeco 15y agoIf they think this PCB is "packed" they haven't looked hard enough at a smartphone teardown. Go look at the iPhone 4S teardown: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2
- r00fus 15y agoDifference is the iPhone has insane margins. You want to pay $35 or $100?
- joezydeco 15y agoJudging by how tight some of those discretes are packed on the board, Apple also has some serious pick and place machines.
- temp5678 15y agoIt's not the PCB that's expensive. It's the components on it.
- sliverstorm 15y agoCustom small-time boards get expensive quickly when you shoot for tighter tolerances, which are necessary for truly tight spacing. If Raspberry Pi expects to sell 10 million units, then even a fancy board will cost nothing, but I doubt they are planning on such numbers...
- nobody31415926 15y agoBoard design is expensive for small units - but assembly costs for complex boards don't drop very much with large numbers. Especially if Apple have every super high-end pick and place robot booked for the next n years!
- DanBC 15y agoThat's often not true; PCBs can be a significant cost on the bill of materials for a gadget. Amortising the tooling / artwork costs into big volumes helps, but even then the PCB is usually one of the more expensive items on the parts list.
- ctdonath 15y agoWhat's their initial production run going to look like? There's a whole lotta geeks who will want this - and at that price, they'll want 10. ($250 for more computers than I'll know what to do with? I'll take 20!)
- polshaw 15y agoThey spoke of 10k initial run.[1] They have also been considering limiting purchases per person. 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU
- DanBC 15y agoI'm really excited by this project. I think it's a great idea. I very much hope they sell them to anyone, maybe at a slightly higher price to subsidise the others. But there's a tiny[1] hint of regret that modern programming is necessarily abstracted away from the hardware. When people were using the popular home computers of the 1980s they would be able to use some version of BASIC, and then also some machine code if needed. And that wasn't something just limited to the brightest smartest young programmers; it was above average but nothing extreme. I learnt Z80 ASM on a suitcase instructional computer, turning fans on and off or stepping through traffic light sequences on LEDs. Then I made a resistor ladder DtoA convertor and pushed data out the parallel printer port for audio. (Something also done by No$GB emulator.) That seems to be something that children will be missing out on, unless this project gives them enough boost to then investigate things like arduino or similar. [1] Not a criticism in any way of the Raspberry Pi project.
- JamesAn 15y agoOne of the operating systems that may be ported to the Pi is RISC OS, which includes a reasonably decent implementation of BASIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC) which itself contains a built-in ARM assembler. A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without needing to download, install and use a compiler. We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered harmful" sense.
- moomin 15y agoAlso, if you wanted to learn bare-metal programming, the entire RISC OS Api was defined in terms of assembler. It's not open source, though.
- polshaw 15y agoThey are selling them to anyone, these are not another OLPC. As for programming abstraction; that is a ship that sailed long ago!
- knodi 15y agoI can't wait to get few of these.
- joshu 15y agoThis is like the best-documented vaporware ever. I hope they prove me wrong soon.
- joezydeco 15y agoWhat doesn't look legit? The PCB silks look typical, the board size is about right for a small SoC-based design. You just need a lot of space for those large connectors like SD/MMC and HDMI. There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.
- kvermeer 15y agoThe part that's suspicious is the $25 price point (the BeagleBoard is $125, the BeagleBone is $90, the Gumstix is $150-$250 depending on configuration). How many products can you name for under $50 (2x the cost of the Raspberry Pi) that approach its specs and capabilities? Also, they're aiming for user-friendliness to the point where it is supposed to be an educational product for young people. These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets rolling is the shaky part. Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust to Broadcomm.
- beagle3 15y agoActually ... Roku has something with similar specs for $50 retail (which means they sell it to retailers at $30 at most). And Apple has something called "AppleTV", which has a little more hardware on it (wifi, power supply, ir remote receiver + remote, 8GB of flash), and sells for $90.
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- ctdonath 15y agoI'm surprised nobody has mentioned the SD card slot.
- sneak 15y agoWhy don't thes people release their files as they work on them? Why don't they resell the bare SoCs at cost or a slight markup so we can use them for other projects? Something has always struck me as fishy about this whole thing.
- easp 15y agoWhy aren't they doing those things? Perhaps because that isn't what they set out to do: We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world. How does selling SoCs at cost or a slight markup serve their aims? My guess, it doesn't. What is fishy about that?
- tesseract 15y agoYou couldn't build one yourself anyway, because Broadcom won't sell you parts or even talk to you unless you're doing volumes like 100k/quarter. And then you'll probably need to sign an NDA to get the datasheet. I see the Raspberry Pi project as an attempt by Broadcom to build some goodwill - but they seem more interested in doing so among society at large by producing a super-affordable computer for kids, than among nerds by doing an open source project. That's Broadcom's prerogative and I applaud what they are doing for what it is. Personally though, as a hardware hacker, I am more likely to buy similar products using TI (BeagleBoard) or Freescale (Chumby Hacker Board) or Atmel parts, as those manufacturers have histories of being a bit more friendly to hackers, hobbyists, and small volume buyers. The BeagleBoard in particular is open source, there's development chatter on an open mailing list, and TI sells the same OMAP SoCs to small volume customers (right down to the possibility of a hobbyist buying one or two through a distributor, although at that volume you'll pay $50 for just the bare SoC).
- polshaw 15y agoRasberry Pi is not a project run by broadcom, just using their SoC (and featuring one of their employees). They are selling the first round to nerds / hardware hackers, and I doubt many others will choose to pay 4x the price to keep using the beagleboard.
- donnawarellp 15y agoIt seems like every couple of weeks for the last year and a half something about this thing gets posted, but still you can not order it. Can you say vapor ware? I predict the Raspberry PI board will never ship, it will forever be hyped. They should just call it Raspberry Hype.
- montecarl 15y agoWhat would be the best way to interface a 2.5" hard drive with one of these? A USB to sata controller? That seems bulky if you want to have it in one case. I'd like to find a compact way to add some storage to the device as I am interested in using it as a media player.
- kennywinker 15y agoIt's got an SD card slot.
- winter_blue 15y agoThis is quite awesome. I can imagine many great things coming out of this. Such cheap computers, will bring computers (and therefore the internet) within range of many people in developing countries. One potential problem will be the cost of monitors, which might exceed the cost of the computers itself :-( But hopefully someone can make cheap monitors soon..