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I'll admit that I haven't been following this very closely, what makes this product this craze worthy compared to something like the Arduino?

• listic 15y ago
  The fact that it's a personal computer, probably.
• semanticist 15y ago
  It's not really directly comparable to an Arduino - it's a full-blown ARM Linux computer, with HDMI, ethernet, and a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM than an Arduino. It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board. An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer. If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.
  • glogla 15y ago
    Yes, the combination would be interesting. Lot of projects in our new media/intermedia/interactive art lab use Arduino for interfacing with buttons, ultrasound sensor, pressure sensors and similar gizmos, while using normal PC for logic or video playback on projectors or something. Raspberry is capable enough for that (though I'm not sure the artists would be happy hacking it in python instead of Processing ;) ), pc's are big and ugly and having two miniature computers doing the whole thing would be really cool. It would also make sense for (noncritical) monitoring systems, where Arduino can interface with pretty much anything, and raspberry could either display things on monitors, or make a web page for remote monitoring, no problem. (you add ethernet to Arduino and run web server on it, sure, but I would never do something that horrible to the little ATmega.)
    • semanticist 15y ago
      I'm not sure why they'd need to use Python, Java's available for Linux on ARM, isn't it?
• glogla 15y ago
  Arduino, while nice and useful (I used it more than once), it's much less than raspberrypi. Arduino's power comes from the community, nice IDE and a lot of examples that are easy to grasp even for someone who is not a CS major. It is wonderful if you want to make you off-shelf PC communicate with simple engines, many types of sensors, things like that, and it's easy to connect to Processing or puredata, it's basically what you get if you want an interactive art piece and don't want to mess with assembler, bootloaders, and whatever. However, Arduino is 30 USD for ATmega, 20 I/O pins and a USB you can use to program it. Raspberrypi is 35 USD (1) for ARM as powerful as the one in iPhone, with 256 MB RAM, HDMI output, two USB ports you can use to connect peripherals, allegedly powerful graphic processors (though it's probably going to have proprietary bloby drivers) and an Ethernet ports. Oh, and some I/O pins too. It's basically a general purpose computer, allegedly as powerful as Pentium III (2), as big as Arduino, and taking slightly more but still incredibly small amount of power. For further comparison, BeagleBoard has slightly better connectivity but worse CPU and graphics, and is bigger, and is 150 USD (about 4x the cost). PandaBoard is faster but similar and is 170 USD (little less than five times the cost). And yesterdays Arstechnica article speaks about similar computer in shape of a small flashdisk with slightly faster CPU than raspberry and ! GB ram costing 200 USD. This is like free.fr for ARM development boards. It doesn't mean Arduino is finished or something (it's best thing was always the simplicity - anything you can do with Arduino can be done with plain ATmega and some hacking and they're dime a dozen) but it's nice. (1): though local prices vary. Here Arduino is listed as about 1 USD less than raspberry. (2): I can't remember where I read that, and it might've been Pentium II, so don't quote me on that, plese
  • GlennS 15y ago
    If anything I think I would expect this to help Arduino by expanding the overall size of the market.