6 ms·

Eben Upton explains the Raspberry Pi Model A+'s new design

110 points by mksaunders 12y ago

reitzensteinm 12y ago
My family had two computers as I grew up - a 486 and a Pentium II. We were quite poor, and both purchases were a monumental event, made possible by unexpected windfalls. I shudder to think what would have happened if they broke prematurely, or the circumstances which led to them being purchased never came about. Certainly my career would have been set back many years (I released my first commercial game - though it made little money - at 15). I was fortunate enough to be a "have", and get the opportunity to learn computing from an early age. I'm a digital native. My proximity to the line of separation makes me think quite a bit about how much worse my life would be without that initial investment. Especially while I'm playing the guitar, which I picked up and enjoy playing badly as an adult (with the money I made from computing), but didn't have access to as a kid. If my talents were in music rather than computing, I'd be flipping burgers right now. It's amazing to me that in this day and age you can get a computer good enough to do serious work on for the price of my last meal. You could learn to program, get contract work, and complete that work entirely from a Raspberry Pi (and a TV or second hand monitor, kb/mouse etc). The dropping of the price of entry level computing has been happening for some time, but we really are to the point that no western kid is missing out due to the cost alone (there are unfortunately still other reasons). Computing has long celebrated its meritocratic nature, but being meritocratic for the middle class and up wasn't ever really something to be proud of. I'm pretty sure by that yardstick yacht racing is meritocratic, too. The world will be such a rich place when each child has the ability to thoroughly search the space of what is potentially interesting to them, and have the means, encouragement and material available to pursue it while they are free from the constraints of adult life. I think we're making great progress there, and it's one of the only aspects of how we are progressing into the future that I am unreservedly excited about. As countries get wealthier and costs continue to fall, the trend will continue globally. I fully expect to end my career being thoroughly outclassed by ultra talented new kids on the block from Cambodia and Ethiopia, born in a decade or two, and nothing could make me happier. (If at that point I turn into a grumpy old man that whines about it when it happens, please do the world a favor and just shoot me.)
- nuxi 12y ago
  Just wanted to say thank you for writing this, it really resonated with me.
- userbinator 12y ago
  What most people don't seem to realise is that large corporations (and even schools) discard tons of perfectly functioning PC hardware every day, the vast majority of which are quite a lot more powerful (P4 or Core level, maybe even more) and open than an RPi, complete with all the necessary peripherals.
  - custardcream 12y ago
    Yes this. My total computing outlay this year is £70 so far. That's £52 for the Samsung SSD (840 Evo) which was new, some rubber feet and a couple of keytops for an X201 I intercepted on the way to the recyclers and £8 for a wireless mouse. So for that, I got an industrial grade laptop with an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD... That's less than a Pi with a suitable monitor/TV to attach to it. (I haven't included the MSDN account copy of Windows 8.1 Pro because I didn't pay for that ;-)
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    This is true, but the logistics and maintenance of a full fleet of those computers is far greater than a set of identical Pis that an admin can flash new cards for on demand.
- bane 12y ago
  This is great. I agree with all of this. I also grew up poor, but for some reason my family always had some kind of computing device near. Never top-end, rarely popular: TRS-80, Coleco Adam, etc. though we really never knew much about computing, I think it was my father's endless fascination with them that made them ever present. I frequently visited my friends who all had C-64s, Mac Classics and Amigas and we'd spend hours tooling around on them. Then somewhere along the way, my parents splurged and bought a 386sx with 2MB of RAM (so I could run Windows) and I was hooked. I remember buying my first soundcard (a SoundBlaster) so I could play .mod files, installing it was a harrowing experience, nobody in my family had ever seen the guts of a computer that wasn't broken (and rendered into pieces out of curiosity). I started getting modems, external at first until I exceeded the speed of the UART and installed my second expansion card and I think it was around that point that I was hooked. I kind of felt like I was hot rodding. My first real job was at a mom and pop computer repair shop where I learned to resurrect by then ancient machines and bring to life top of the line Pentiums. Along the way I bought and built several of my own machines out of spare parts lying around the shop, the pinnacle was a 486dx2-66 with 8MB of RAM, a decent machine at the time...built for around $50. My friends, knowing I had an inside line and the knowhow started buying parts, memory, whatever through me. It felt like the ascendancy of power. I won a Pentium Pro motherboard at a conference drawing and spent a couple month's wages completing the rest of the system, it lasted me for years. I remember when a local computer store ran a promotion, "Computer for $1000!" and the line was out the door and around the block. It made the Windows 95 release madness look tame. People were thirsty for affordable, accessible, usable computing. Most people in that line were buying their first computer and had no idea what they were going to do with it. The store solved that by giving out disks for a local free ISP they could dial in and suddenly thousands of people in my area were connected to millions of other people. I'm continuously in awe of how powerful an affordable computing has become. A $200 device that also happens to be a phone is an order of magnitude better computer than the one those people were standing in line hours for. It's also connected to the same Internet, but the things we can do on that internet today are orders of magnitude bigger. I do worry about today's kids in a sense, they'll never know the joy of learning to build a boot disk from scratch so they can play their favorite game, the OSs are simply too complicated for that kind of fooling around. The entire OS, including a BASIC of my 386sx fit on a couple floppies, came with a few games and was only a few dozen files. In some ways the Pi brings lots of that back, it's bareboned enough that you have to figure it out to get it to work. But I wonder how popular it's actually been with kids getting into cheap computing vs. adults looking for something cheap to tinker on?
keenerd 12y ago
Looks pretty heavily inspired by the Odroid-W.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Which in turn was inspired by the rpi http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=g140610189490 http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code... Also, I've seen people stripping rpi to get slimmer profiles, and the A+ is really close to that.
SeanLuke 12y ago
> “If you’re building something with robotics, or essentially any project that doesn’t need Ethernet networking, it’s a great fit.” Hmmm. I use these boards only for robotics. And a primary reason why I pick a Raspberry Pi is because it has an ethernet port.
- marti 12y ago
  You are talking about the Model B/B+ then, as Model A and A+ do not have an ethernet port.
- lovelearning 12y ago
  Your robots need an active ethernet connection to function?
  - dws 12y ago
    If you're competing in FIRST Robotics, yes.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    A surprising number of devices offer data acquisition over TCP/IP either in telnet, or HTTP get requests.
    - lovelearning 12y ago
      True, but all the Raspberry Pi's have atleast 1 USB port to which a WLAN adapter can be attached. Less cumbersome than ethernet cables, unless ethernet is mandated by competition rules or something. Of course, these may not be mobile robots at all, in which case ethernet makes sense.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    Wireless isn't particularly reliable in all situations.
shasheene 12y ago
There's a few new options for cheap, relatively powerful hardware platforms than also break the $20 barrier. Specifically Mozilla Matchstick, the Chromecast-like HDMI dongle (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...) was selling for $12 with free US shipping in limited quanties, or around $17 for unlimited quantity with internationally shipping ($85 for 5). It uses a dual-core Rockchip 3066 SoC (ARM Cortex A9 with Mali-400 GPU), 1GB DDR3 RAM, 4GB storage and built-in wifi. The downside compared to the Raspberry Pi model A+ is it's lacking on the IO front (no USB, headphone, composite video, and presumably no GPIO etc).
- Narishma 12y ago
  No SD card either, and I believe the Raspberry Pi GPU is faster. I also don't believe it's made by Mozilla.
  - shasheene 12y ago
    Yep, you're right. It's an independent company based in San Jose with no investment by Mozilla: "MatchStick is backed by Chinese hardware maker aBitCool and other investors, who Chang said he could not disclose. Mozilla is not one of the investors, Chang said." I'm not sure whether VideoCore IV is faster than Mali-400, however.
baldfat 12y ago
I think that the model A is so over looked. I personally am trying to use these for a monitoring building a mesh system with used usb wifi. For my house I just need wireless. These fit perfect for the job.
speeq 12y ago
Power consumption of the Model A+ with 1Wh sounds impressive. Does the Pi also have a sleep mode where it draws even less? Using two Panasonic NCR18650B 18650 batteries (each ~12Wh) and a 3V to 5V step-up converter it should be able to run for a day! Add a solar panel + charging circuit and you have a little Linux computer which is able to run continuously on solar power :) EDIT: 1Wh is with a monitor plugged in and running a GPU-intensive demo, I wonder what the power consumption is like without a GUI but just a WiFi dongle and the Pi-camera sending snapshots periodically.
- pflanze 12y ago
  > and a 3V to 5V step-up converter You may want to step it up to 3.3V only for the main power supply and do a little surgery on the Pi to feed it directly to its 3.3V 'rail', foregoing the 5V->3.3V linear regulator. (I'm just saying this from reading the given page, I haven't done this myself, so YMMV.) http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_consumption_of_a_raspberry_Pi http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_... BTW it's not clear to me whether the Pi or the Beaglebone Black use less power [when idle]. The latter would provide more CPU power, which would make it more interesting for a general purpose solar computer. PS. I was thinking about the B+ when writing the above (stupid me, should actually read the article before posting). The A+ likely has lower power consumption than the Beaglebone (but also only 256 MB RAM, which is really going to be limiting for many tasks). Also, perhaps they have replaced the 5V->3.3V linear regulator with a step-down regulator which would be more efficient (still, doing only one transformation instead of two would give you a bit lower losses).
  - speeq 12y ago
    Thanks! They seem to have replaced the linear regulator with a switching regulator (which is more efficient) on the A+ & B+ models. I agree though, doing only one transformation would be more efficient - but I'm not sure which USB devices would work on 3.3V - it depends on the individual use-case I guess.
    - pflanze 12y ago

110 points by mksaunders 12y ago

My family had two computers as I grew up - a 486 and a Pentium II. We were quite poor, and both purchases were a monumental event, made possible by unexpected windfalls. I shudder to think what would have happened if they broke prematurely, or the circumstances which led to them being purchased never came about. Certainly my career would have been set back many years (I released my first commercial game - though it made little money - at 15). I was fortunate enough to be a "have", and get the opportunity to learn computing from an early age. I'm a digital native. My proximity to the line of separation makes me think quite a bit about how much worse my life would be without that initial investment. Especially while I'm playing the guitar, which I picked up and enjoy playing badly as an adult (with the money I made from computing), but didn't have access to as a kid. If my talents were in music rather than computing, I'd be flipping burgers right now. It's amazing to me that in this day and age you can get a computer good enough to do serious work on for the price of my last meal. You could learn to program, get contract work, and complete that work entirely from a Raspberry Pi (and a TV or second hand monitor, kb/mouse etc). The dropping of the price of entry level computing has been happening for some time, but we really are to the point that no western kid is missing out due to the cost alone (there are unfortunately still other reasons). Computing has long celebrated its meritocratic nature, but being meritocratic for the middle class and up wasn't ever really something to be proud of. I'm pretty sure by that yardstick yacht racing is meritocratic, too. The world will be such a rich place when each child has the ability to thoroughly search the space of what is potentially interesting to them, and have the means, encouragement and material available to pursue it while they are free from the constraints of adult life. I think we're making great progress there, and it's one of the only aspects of how we are progressing into the future that I am unreservedly excited about. As countries get wealthier and costs continue to fall, the trend will continue globally. I fully expect to end my career being thoroughly outclassed by ultra talented new kids on the block from Cambodia and Ethiopia, born in a decade or two, and nothing could make me happier. (If at that point I turn into a grumpy old man that whines about it when it happens, please do the world a favor and just shoot me.)

nuxi 12y ago
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this, it really resonated with me.
userbinator 12y ago
What most people don't seem to realise is that large corporations (and even schools) discard tons of perfectly functioning PC hardware every day, the vast majority of which are quite a lot more powerful (P4 or Core level, maybe even more) and open than an RPi, complete with all the necessary peripherals.
- custardcream 12y ago
  Yes this. My total computing outlay this year is £70 so far. That's £52 for the Samsung SSD (840 Evo) which was new, some rubber feet and a couple of keytops for an X201 I intercepted on the way to the recyclers and £8 for a wireless mouse. So for that, I got an industrial grade laptop with an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD... That's less than a Pi with a suitable monitor/TV to attach to it. (I haven't included the MSDN account copy of Windows 8.1 Pro because I didn't pay for that ;-)
- yzzxy 12y ago
  This is true, but the logistics and maintenance of a full fleet of those computers is far greater than a set of identical Pis that an admin can flash new cards for on demand.
bane 12y ago
This is great. I agree with all of this. I also grew up poor, but for some reason my family always had some kind of computing device near. Never top-end, rarely popular: TRS-80, Coleco Adam, etc. though we really never knew much about computing, I think it was my father's endless fascination with them that made them ever present. I frequently visited my friends who all had C-64s, Mac Classics and Amigas and we'd spend hours tooling around on them. Then somewhere along the way, my parents splurged and bought a 386sx with 2MB of RAM (so I could run Windows) and I was hooked. I remember buying my first soundcard (a SoundBlaster) so I could play .mod files, installing it was a harrowing experience, nobody in my family had ever seen the guts of a computer that wasn't broken (and rendered into pieces out of curiosity). I started getting modems, external at first until I exceeded the speed of the UART and installed my second expansion card and I think it was around that point that I was hooked. I kind of felt like I was hot rodding. My first real job was at a mom and pop computer repair shop where I learned to resurrect by then ancient machines and bring to life top of the line Pentiums. Along the way I bought and built several of my own machines out of spare parts lying around the shop, the pinnacle was a 486dx2-66 with 8MB of RAM, a decent machine at the time...built for around $50. My friends, knowing I had an inside line and the knowhow started buying parts, memory, whatever through me. It felt like the ascendancy of power. I won a Pentium Pro motherboard at a conference drawing and spent a couple month's wages completing the rest of the system, it lasted me for years. I remember when a local computer store ran a promotion, "Computer for $1000!" and the line was out the door and around the block. It made the Windows 95 release madness look tame. People were thirsty for affordable, accessible, usable computing. Most people in that line were buying their first computer and had no idea what they were going to do with it. The store solved that by giving out disks for a local free ISP they could dial in and suddenly thousands of people in my area were connected to millions of other people. I'm continuously in awe of how powerful an affordable computing has become. A $200 device that also happens to be a phone is an order of magnitude better computer than the one those people were standing in line hours for. It's also connected to the same Internet, but the things we can do on that internet today are orders of magnitude bigger. I do worry about today's kids in a sense, they'll never know the joy of learning to build a boot disk from scratch so they can play their favorite game, the OSs are simply too complicated for that kind of fooling around. The entire OS, including a BASIC of my 386sx fit on a couple floppies, came with a few games and was only a few dozen files. In some ways the Pi brings lots of that back, it's bareboned enough that you have to figure it out to get it to work. But I wonder how popular it's actually been with kids getting into cheap computing vs. adults looking for something cheap to tinker on?

keenerd 12y ago

Looks pretty heavily inspired by the Odroid-W.

agumonkey 12y ago
Which in turn was inspired by the rpi http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=g140610189490 http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code... Also, I've seen people stripping rpi to get slimmer profiles, and the A+ is really close to that.

SeanLuke 12y ago

> “If you’re building something with robotics, or essentially any project that doesn’t need Ethernet networking, it’s a great fit.” Hmmm. I use these boards only for robotics. And a primary reason why I pick a Raspberry Pi is because it has an ethernet port.

marti 12y ago
You are talking about the Model B/B+ then, as Model A and A+ do not have an ethernet port.
lovelearning 12y ago
Your robots need an active ethernet connection to function?
- dws 12y ago
  If you're competing in FIRST Robotics, yes.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  A surprising number of devices offer data acquisition over TCP/IP either in telnet, or HTTP get requests.
  - lovelearning 12y ago
    True, but all the Raspberry Pi's have atleast 1 USB port to which a WLAN adapter can be attached. Less cumbersome than ethernet cables, unless ethernet is mandated by competition rules or something. Of course, these may not be mobile robots at all, in which case ethernet makes sense.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  Wireless isn't particularly reliable in all situations.

shasheene 12y ago

There's a few new options for cheap, relatively powerful hardware platforms than also break the $20 barrier. Specifically Mozilla Matchstick, the Chromecast-like HDMI dongle (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...) was selling for $12 with free US shipping in limited quanties, or around $17 for unlimited quantity with internationally shipping ($85 for 5). It uses a dual-core Rockchip 3066 SoC (ARM Cortex A9 with Mali-400 GPU), 1GB DDR3 RAM, 4GB storage and built-in wifi. The downside compared to the Raspberry Pi model A+ is it's lacking on the IO front (no USB, headphone, composite video, and presumably no GPIO etc).

Narishma 12y ago
No SD card either, and I believe the Raspberry Pi GPU is faster. I also don't believe it's made by Mozilla.
- shasheene 12y ago
  Yep, you're right. It's an independent company based in San Jose with no investment by Mozilla: "MatchStick is backed by Chinese hardware maker aBitCool and other investors, who Chang said he could not disclose. Mozilla is not one of the investors, Chang said." I'm not sure whether VideoCore IV is faster than Mali-400, however.

baldfat 12y ago

I think that the model A is so over looked. I personally am trying to use these for a monitoring building a mesh system with used usb wifi. For my house I just need wireless. These fit perfect for the job.

speeq 12y ago

Power consumption of the Model A+ with 1Wh sounds impressive. Does the Pi also have a sleep mode where it draws even less? Using two Panasonic NCR18650B 18650 batteries (each ~12Wh) and a 3V to 5V step-up converter it should be able to run for a day! Add a solar panel + charging circuit and you have a little Linux computer which is able to run continuously on solar power :) EDIT: 1Wh is with a monitor plugged in and running a GPU-intensive demo, I wonder what the power consumption is like without a GUI but just a WiFi dongle and the Pi-camera sending snapshots periodically.

pflanze 12y ago
> and a 3V to 5V step-up converter You may want to step it up to 3.3V only for the main power supply and do a little surgery on the Pi to feed it directly to its 3.3V 'rail', foregoing the 5V->3.3V linear regulator. (I'm just saying this from reading the given page, I haven't done this myself, so YMMV.) http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_consumption_of_a_raspberry_Pi http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_... BTW it's not clear to me whether the Pi or the Beaglebone Black use less power [when idle]. The latter would provide more CPU power, which would make it more interesting for a general purpose solar computer. PS. I was thinking about the B+ when writing the above (stupid me, should actually read the article before posting). The A+ likely has lower power consumption than the Beaglebone (but also only 256 MB RAM, which is really going to be limiting for many tasks). Also, perhaps they have replaced the 5V->3.3V linear regulator with a step-down regulator which would be more efficient (still, doing only one transformation instead of two would give you a bit lower losses).
- speeq 12y ago
  Thanks! They seem to have replaced the linear regulator with a switching regulator (which is more efficient) on the A+ & B+ models. I agree though, doing only one transformation would be more efficient - but I'm not sure which USB devices would work on 3.3V - it depends on the individual use-case I guess.
  - pflanze 12y ago