Raspberry Pi

[teamonkey]

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/game ... 5-2011055/

[gravy]

I really really like the look of this

[Ollie]

"Obfusticated"?

[Zoot]

Fan-bloody-tastic. I learned 8088 assembler way back in the day on an OU course that supplied a "kit computer" (somewhat bigger than the Rasberry PI!), but it had exactly the same principle. You could program robots with it too, teaching about interfacing, interrupts etc.

All hail the great Mr Braben. I hope that he has been spending at least some of his time on Elite, however

Seriously, people who can look at the bigger picture and are brave enough to do something about it (like Jamie Oliver with his school food programme) deserve an enormous amount of credit.

Oh, and Braben did Elite

[Stone]

That looks rather tasty. Is that a webcam in the middle?

Stone

[teamonkey]

I think it's an optional webcam module, yeah.

I'm not sure about the charity goals though. It's a cheap computer for poor kids who own a HDTV. Companies dump thousands of worthless 10-year-old PCs all the time, why not support a charity to redistribute those?

[Rhythm]

That looks rather tasty. Is that a webcam in the middle?

Stone

12mp according to the screenshot on the BBC website.

Got to say, this looks bloody fantastic. I'm just starting to learn to program at the moment and would love to get my girls into it as they grow up - the potential to be able to give them each a couple of these is great

[Baggypants]

I love it.

I also need to chuck out Ubuntu and use a linux distro thats a little less forgiving.

[Firefox]

Top Comments

Well that's all very nice David, BUT WHERE IS ELITE 4????

Max404s 20 hours ago

Seriously, though, it's a very cool initiative. I love the way it makes use of stuff that's rapidly becoming commonplace - plug it into a telly for a display, use one of those "free" 2GB uSD cards that's bundled with everything nowadays for storage, get a keyboard from Tesco or a pound shop...

Some more technical details would be nice, though. I presume it's powered by the HDMI connector... What's the ribbon cable soldered into the side of the board? An optional expansion port of some kind?

Obviously, I want one. Or probably three or four, if they really are £15 a pop.

[Firefox]

Good presentation by David Braben linked to from the comments on the BBC article:

http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com ... -2011.html

(He talks briefly about the Raspberry Pi board at about the twelve-minute mark, and reveals that the ribbon cable soldered on is just a JTAG debugger connection.)

[Barney]

He wants to be getting on with Elite IV, not fannying about with this sort of crap.

[gumboot]

He's put the wrong kind of USB connector on it!

[xav]

He's put the wrong kind of USB connector on it!

That was my immediate thought.


With more monitors supporting HDMI inputs this looks like a great solution for setting up a room of thin clients. A few years back I had to set up a small network of machines for training sessions. I went for remote booting thin clients with a smallish Linux box as the server. The thin clients cost almost as much as the monitors though. Something like this would slash the costs of such a setup. Just a shame that adding a USB=>Ethernet dongle will almost double the price!

[Stone]

I'm happier with a USB device connector instead of a host, it means you can have it double as a cardreader to stick your programs on it, or use it as a control or tty connection. You can buy all the illegal cable types in Poundland now, that part of the standard's totally broken...

That webcam would make it a nice AR host, too.

Stone

[disciple]

He's put the wrong kind of USB connector on it!

Maybe it needs a powered USB hub?