5 ms·

I keep watching, but all of the other ARM boards cost more than the Rπ – usually greater than 3x the cost of the RπB. You can occasionally find an Arduino for

by bandy 14y ago

I keep watching, but all of the other ARM boards cost more than the Rπ – usually greater than 3x the cost of the RπB. You can occasionally find an Arduino for less than what the RπB will run you, and while it has the GPIO, it doesn't have nearly the crunch the Rπ gets you. Mine will be running some network testing software, driving a small handful of devices – doing the work a small laptop was doing before, but with a better power budget and in a much smaller form-factor. I don't need a display while it's running - it's going to sit there and collect data for me until I command it to shut down, at which point, I'll remove the SD, grab the data, and process it a bit on a more capable box, although it's conceivable that I could do it all on the Rπ itself.

bigiain 14y ago
A bunch of us at Robots & Dinosaurs (a HackerSpace in Sydney) have been playing with the TP Link WR-703N wireless routers* reflashing them with OpenWRT - they're available from Deal Extreme or eBay for under $25 - it's got no video, but it includes ethernet and onboard wifi. One of the guys has a stackable "daugherboard" which breaks-out/adds a USB hub, FTDI/GPIO/JTAG and two serial ports: http://www.kean.com.au/oshw/WR703N/ http://www.kean.com.au/oshw/WR703N/ It's not as high powered as a RaspberryPi though, only a 400MHz cpu and 32M ram (+4M flash) - they're useful little machines, but the onboard video on the Pi kinda puts them in a different class. On the other hand, a Pi with ethernet/wifi/powersupply costs several times what a TP-W703N costs... * http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n
- bandy 14y ago
  Several times? $35USD list price, and approximately $49USD delivered (tax/shipping). I could do my project with dd-wrt/openwrt, but I'd be storage-limited. A day's worth of data is in the hundreds of megabytes range, uncompressed. Your WR-703N plus a daughterboard would make an OK basis for a NAS.
  - semanticist 14y ago
    A Raspberry Pi also requires a PSU, an SD card, and a case. By the time you add those in, you've probably doubled your cost, at least.
    - bandy 14y ago
      Powered off of mini-USB (I have extra chargers laying about), SD cards are cheap cheap cheap (I also have a selection on-hand), and a case can be made out of LEGO bricks (again…). You forgot to add-on "keyboard, mouse, and monitor". Again, these are things that people usually have. For the dev cards mentioned up-thread, you'd have to have some sort of programming dongle, which more than doubles their cost, as well as get your hands on the right magic toolchain.
      - bigiain 14y ago
        All true - still means that bare minimum, a Pi (delivered) is double the price of a W703N (delivered). If you need add any/all of: wifi, power supply, SDcard, enclosure - to the Pi for your project, then I think "a few times the price" is a reasonable description. Not everybody will have "spares" of those "on hand", and if your project involves building more than one of whatever, then you can't rely on "on hand" extras. On the other hand, if you don't need wifi and you do need video out, then the Pi is an obvious choice. my project for the TL-W703N is a Tahoe-LAFS server/storage appliance - the router and a 1 or 2TB USB harddrive - if I could put 10 or 12 of them together and distribute them amongst friends, just a harddrive sized package they need to plug into the wall and allow on their wifi (or wired) network, in return everyone gets several hundred Gig of "private cloud storage" with baked-in encryption and distributed storage reliability.
4ad 14y ago
> I keep watching, but all of the other ARM boards cost more than the Rπ https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html
- bandy 14y ago
  Ok, for an embedded controller project without much in the way of I/O (just GPIO), you can get a cheaper unit, it seems. If you want the ethernet and the USB and mass storage (SD Card), and an actual O/S (Linux), it seems as if Rπ still has it beat, but this is a very good resource, thank you.

by bandy 14y ago

bigiain 14y ago

A bunch of us at Robots & Dinosaurs (a HackerSpace in Sydney) have been playing with the TP Link WR-703N wireless routers* reflashing them with OpenWRT - they're available from Deal Extreme or eBay for under $25 - it's got no video, but it includes ethernet and onboard wifi. One of the guys has a stackable "daugherboard" which breaks-out/adds a USB hub, FTDI/GPIO/JTAG and two serial ports: http://www.kean.com.au/oshw/WR703N/ http://www.kean.com.au/oshw/WR703N/ It's not as high powered as a RaspberryPi though, only a 400MHz cpu and 32M ram (+4M flash) - they're useful little machines, but the onboard video on the Pi kinda puts them in a different class. On the other hand, a Pi with ethernet/wifi/powersupply costs several times what a TP-W703N costs... * http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n

bandy 14y ago
Several times? $35USD list price, and approximately $49USD delivered (tax/shipping). I could do my project with dd-wrt/openwrt, but I'd be storage-limited. A day's worth of data is in the hundreds of megabytes range, uncompressed. Your WR-703N plus a daughterboard would make an OK basis for a NAS.
- semanticist 14y ago
  A Raspberry Pi also requires a PSU, an SD card, and a case. By the time you add those in, you've probably doubled your cost, at least.
  - bandy 14y ago
    Powered off of mini-USB (I have extra chargers laying about), SD cards are cheap cheap cheap (I also have a selection on-hand), and a case can be made out of LEGO bricks (again…). You forgot to add-on "keyboard, mouse, and monitor". Again, these are things that people usually have. For the dev cards mentioned up-thread, you'd have to have some sort of programming dongle, which more than doubles their cost, as well as get your hands on the right magic toolchain.
    - bigiain 14y ago
      All true - still means that bare minimum, a Pi (delivered) is double the price of a W703N (delivered). If you need add any/all of: wifi, power supply, SDcard, enclosure - to the Pi for your project, then I think "a few times the price" is a reasonable description. Not everybody will have "spares" of those "on hand", and if your project involves building more than one of whatever, then you can't rely on "on hand" extras. On the other hand, if you don't need wifi and you do need video out, then the Pi is an obvious choice. my project for the TL-W703N is a Tahoe-LAFS server/storage appliance - the router and a 1 or 2TB USB harddrive - if I could put 10 or 12 of them together and distribute them amongst friends, just a harddrive sized package they need to plug into the wall and allow on their wifi (or wired) network, in return everyone gets several hundred Gig of "private cloud storage" with baked-in encryption and distributed storage reliability.

4ad 14y ago

> I keep watching, but all of the other ARM boards cost more than the Rπ https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html

bandy 14y ago
Ok, for an embedded controller project without much in the way of I/O (just GPIO), you can get a cheaper unit, it seems. If you want the ethernet and the USB and mass storage (SD Card), and an actual O/S (Linux), it seems as if Rπ still has it beat, but this is a very good resource, thank you.