Oh boy, this reminds me so much of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Almost every geek cries out "I want this thing now and play around with it." But the inventor is like "No, no, its all for the kids. You can't have it."
The OLPC Hardware could have been a huge commercial success if it had been gone into production soon after the orignal presentation. But no, it needed Acer and their EEE-PC to satisfy that demand.
Why develop a "universal purpose something" specifically for children? You're not a child anymore so its way easier to build something YOU want than imagine what exactly a child wants or needs. In fact, I'm sure this guy wants the USB-PC more than anyone else on the planet. Also, if you mass produce you bring down prices anyway.
But most important, everyone knows what children want in general: They want to be just like their adult idols!
Don't tell kids: "This is for you. I wish I had it when I was a kid. Now, have fun, while daddy works on his Mac."
> 1) How long do you think it will be before the boards become available?
I'd say three or four months. As you can see from the screenshots, we
have usable Linux, but we're waiting to get final versions of the the
chip from our supplier.
> 2) Are there any plans for a version with onboard ethernet?
I don't think we're likely to do onboard Ethernet; we will have an
onboard 3-port USB hub so people can add an external adapter.
> 3) Are there any plans for a version with onboard wifi?
Yes. The final version (though maybe not the first distributables)
will have onboard WiFi (probably 802.11n) in the price point.
> 4) What are the power requirements, both under load and at rest?
At rest I'd say 50mW (we could trim this if it was really important,
but it gets a bit fiddly below this point), under serious load
(original XBox class graphics or 1080p30 H.264), 700mW.
I'm looking at this as a replacement for the Bifferboards [1] I often use in projects, they're similarly priced (£35), but significantly lower specification.
At rest I'd say 50mW (we could trim this if it was really important,
but it gets a bit fiddly below this point), under serious load
(original XBox class graphics or 1080p30 H.264), 700mW.
I wonder if this means you actually can power it from HDMI's 5V pin (which is limited to 50mA ie 250mW) for some uses?
After my initial excitement of "wow, cool" and "wow, tiny" and "wow, cheap" wore off, I'm also becoming skeptical about what niche this fills for educators.
Why? Because an old PC with equivalent specs is essentially free (anything from ~2000 onwards.) Thousands of them, desktop and laptop, will be being recycled or landfilled every day.
Linux on x86 hardware is standard enough that you can effectively call it a standard platform for developers, already, same as this.
The remaining key advantage (I guess) is size. And maybe the fact that it's easier to get kids excited about playing with a tiny brand new board than with a 10 year old computer.
It may cost more than $25 per computer to collect computers being recycled, evaluate them for suitability, clean them up, and install a fresh copy of Ubuntu on them.
Also, the size difference could be significant, as well as allow novel ways of using it. For instance, if the goal is to get this machine into areas outside cities were computers are more common, shipping costs could be significant if recycled desktops/laptops are used instead.
I can imagine that you can conduct a class where kids take these computers home, along with a school-supplied keyboard, for use with the TV set they have at home, to work on computer (programming) assignments. This would allow the school to avoid the cost of acquiring monitors.
As an educator, I would LOVE to have access to these. One of the hardest things I have found is to provide a development environment for the kids at home that is the same as they have at school. You can tell them to install Ubuntu and Greenfoot on their machine at home, but there is no way to help them get things set up, or fix configuration problems unless you have access to their machine.
With this, they use the exact same machine at home and at school, and it is easy for them to carry back and forth. The only downside is that they would also be easy to lose, so there would need to be a big lanyard attached so they can wear them around their necks.
With respect to size, you could easily get a suitcase full of these into any developing country, while a suitcase full of "pentium-class machine" contains only 1. You can also own and carry these things without making yourself a target.
On the power front, the power requirements are minimal, allowing them to take advantage of the solar infrastructure in places that rely on car battery power (central america is covered in solar). Also to run on 12V SLAs which are a common feature in places with unreliable power.
You might be surprised to learn that your city may have a recycling contract with the landfill. Those thousands of landfilled PCs are effectively unavailable to you or anyone else, no matter how feel-good the project.
I think this is a Good Thing and I hope it becomes available to everyone.
I'd say that is definitely true, especially in America and the like.
In the developing world though, I imagine there are some huge advantages to the power consumption of this. These may make it feasible to run a computer lab off of solar panels.
There are already computers that draw low enough currents to do this now but they are quite expensive. ($3-500 as I recall)
I don't think there is any possibility that you could provide a large number of students recycled computers with similar hardware capabilities for essentially free.
Why not? When we recently opened our Hackerspace a friendly e-waste dealer gave us 10 SFF Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Compaqs. He said they're not worth the effort of selling any more, and to let him know if we need more. He had palette-loads.
Last week my coworker bought an ex-government ultra-small-form-factor Dell PentiumD 3Ghz for $30 in an auction, they were selling dozens that way in single quantities for between $20-$40. 3Ghz PC with 1Gb of RAM!
A friend showed me the disposal tunnel at the local unversity, they have palettes stacked 1m high with old Pentium4-era computers and old CRT monitors waiting to be picked up for recycling. The university pays for them to be taken away.
I'm in Australia, but I expect if you look around most developed countries you'll find this is the situation - old computers all over the place scrapped, resold or shipped off-shore. The developing world is where a lot of those computers end up, so in those countries a $25 USB-stick-computer with no excess shipping cost may still be a better option than paying for shipping a crate of old machines. However, I guarantee you there is no shortage of old hardware out there.
There are many, many thousands of school kids. Once you started putting those kind of demands on the market they wouldn't be going for free anymore. Not to mention the quality control problems.
I think you've missed my point a bit. My point is that if all that is needed for schools to expand CS education is cheap commodity computer hardware, it already exists.
If educational "demands on the market" don't exist for P4-era used PCs now, are they necessarily going to exist for the USB stick PC?
The availability of hardware on a completely ad-hoc basis gives nothing for developers of software and curriculum to target. The potential deployment of thousands of these devices to children at once and the awareness and cooperation of the education department would completely change what you could do with it.
Perhaps the problem with a big black box P4 is the infrastructure requirements. Mind you they're not a lot smaller if you still need a flat screen and keyboard but I can see it being easier to find space in a school ... you also get a system that is going to be usable at home/library for a lot of children in more developed countries/regions.
What you're describing works great on a small scale if you've got a few interested geeks to help out, but as soon as you have to support it in the large, homogeneity becomes very important.
Well, I think the immediate advantage is that you can make sure that every PC has the same hardware configuration, which makes 'fleet' management much easier. Also, now the school pays for screens and keyboards that stay, but when they decide to upgrade the computers in three years time, it only costs $25 per student to do so.
I honestly don't see how this is gong to encourage people, especially kids, to further wonder about how computers work, and what actually happens. It's smaller, and if anything even less accessible than a desktop machine.
I learned about computers and computing by building my own from a Z80, 8KB RAM, 8KB ROM, random logic, etching my own circuit board and soldering the components and sockets in place.
Very cool, but i'm not sure how he can get it to an actual cost of $25 unless it's heavily supported by donations, grants, "give one get one" etc. For small runs (<10K?) the cost of production has to be a large multiplier on that.
Other options in this space (far more expensive! but similar ARM on a board style)
The cost of $25 looks a bit more believable compared to similarly specced devices like the VT8500/WM8505 series <$100 netbooks/tablets[1], or the FriendlyARM Mini2440 which sells on ebay for $98 as a bells-and-whistles development board.
The board he's built would have lower BoM cost than either of those. And if he's manufacturing them in similar quantities then maybe he can get the cost down.
If he's looking at production runs of similar numbers to wireless routers then I think $25 is completely believable, as cheap end wireless routers approach that cost new now.
Sure... but realistically, what kind of quantities is he going to pull off? And is he really going to contract out to a chinese factory? I mean, i'll get a few :) but if this is for education and nothing else.... I'll check back in a year for sure.
For now, the Trimslice is pretty exciting (and shipping, and of course in a very different world)
I don't know, I mean presumably he's thinking OLPC-esque. I could see this being at least as popular as the WM8505/VT8500 devices just on price (price having being those devices _only_ selling point), and then the education angle picking up some more bulk deals with education departments.
is he really going to contract out to a chinese factory?
Does anyone not contract out to a Chinese factory of some kind, these days?
For now, the Trimslice is pretty exciting
That is exciting, I hadn't seen those before! Thanks for the link.
Of course, as you say that is a "different world". The Trimslice is four-generations of ARM along the line, in x86 spec equivalents it's a Pentium III compared to a Core 2 Duo.
I have a Trimslice Dev-Kit (I'm a Gentoo developer) and I have one of the 32GB on order. There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main point I want to address is the "equivalent to a pentium 3"; this is definitely not the case. Just because it is a dual core running at 1ghz doesn't mean it's slow. In fact most ARM machines are slower than their equivalent chips, but not as much as people would think. An example is the EfikaMX (Cortex A-8 @ 800MHz) runs only ~20% slower than an Atom clocked at 1.6GHz. But at a fraction of the power usage. My apartment is full of ARM machines and I have a build farm of ~20 that are compiling software (Ubuntu and Gentoo) 24/7 and my power bill was 40 dollars. They also generate much less heat, and don't require fans, and most run off integrated SSD drives (PATA and SATA) so there are no moving parts at all in them. And... They are cheap. I can get a brand new ARM based netbook for 200 dollars that gives me ~ the equivalent processing of an Atom netbook of the same price... Except the Atom netbook is a refurb.
Cheaper, lower power consumption, and almost the same processing power. It works for me, sure I can't use proprietary software, or something like dropbox that requires a proprietary daemon, but I don't really miss it much. At first you notice but as you use it more, you come to realize that you really didn't need it.
Sorry if this was a huge wall of text, I am responding via my phone.
It won't let me respond to your comment, and you're right, I shouldn't have made that comment. I do apologize, and apparently misread the comment. Hopefully people can look past both things and realize that there is more to ARM than just "omg the processor isn't as fast as a quad core i7"; That said, I'm also looking forward to this board and hope it makes it stateside. I love ARM (if you couldn't tell), and the main thing holding it back is the lack of people who are familiar with it. Since it's been most typically an embedded processor, most people don't write software for it unless it is specialized.
And pretty much any game that runs on an iPhone could run on an ARM desktop. Off the top of my head, popular "mainstream" games that I can think of would be Street Fighter 4, Mirror's Edge, I'm sure there are more, I just happen to have those 2 installed on my iPhone. ARM machines can also run Android, as long as you are willing to put in the kernel work, and most companies do these days.
The EfikaMX has a "desktop" version as well as a netbook version. They are both almost identical, although the netbook version doesn't have any video out. It also runs off of a 3 cell battery, and gets somewhere in the range of 6-8 hours of solid usage, not just sitting there almost suspended. They(i.MX515) pack the AMD(ATI)z430 3D unit, which runs at 133MHz (the i.MX535 version will run at 200MHz); This is also known as a Qualcomm Adreno, although the Adreno uses a z180 instead of z160 for the 2D unit, not sure if it uses something other than the z430 for 3D. The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz.
I'm not sure what graphics card will come with the ARM11, but if it does 1080p and OpenGL ES 2.0, then I'd guess that it's a Mali. I could definitely be wrong, but really, at 25 dollars, even if you only played with it every once in a while, it's probably worth it. And if they do a buy one give one like OLPC did, I'd definitely order a minimum of 4. I hope they are able to, and I'll be watching closely.
The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz.
There is much more to a GPU than simply clock speed. Since modern GPUs do everything with programmable shader units, the number of units acting in parallel makes a big difference, as well as the efficiency of the units (cycles per instruction). Many mobile GPUs' shader units can be counted on one hand[1], while a modern AMD or nVidia GPU has hundreds (though the different architectures make a direct comparison of numbers almost meaningless).
[1] I had a hard time finding exact specs last time I looked, but I seem to remember reading about one popular SoC whose GPU had in the neighborhood of 4 pixel shader units.
There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main point I want to address is the "equivalent to a pentium 3"; this is definitely not the case. Just because it is a dual core running at 1ghz doesn't mean it's slow
I meant the analogy the other way. That the USB stick computer is the Pentium 3 equivalent and the Trimslice is "four generations along the line", something like the Core 2 Duo.
Believe me, I'm extremely excited about the performance/costs power nexus of these new ARM cores. :). And well jealous of your Cortex-A8 build farm.
(I did get at least one thing wrong in my reply, which is I somehow thought the USB stick computer was ARM9 not ARM11. So it's only 3 generations of ARM before the Cortex A-9, and that's disregarding all the other lesser-used ARM cores that came between.)
PS Please don't make sweeping statements like There are probably other things incorrect in your comment, that's just plain rude.
Gumstix is way overpriced. If this really does come out for $25, it will be really disrupt the hobbyist embedded market. The closest similar systems are Bifferboards (http://bifferos.bizhat.com/ 35 pounds for 150mhz 486) or the Teensy++ ($24 for an AVR).
If a tiny ARM-based Linux computer is appealing, there are a number you can buy now based on the Marvell Plug design. I use a TonidoPlug[1] with Ubuntu for an ultra-cheap backup and media server. Only uses ~5-10 watts so you can have it on 24/7 at virtually no electricity cost.
This is interesting because it supports connecting a monitor and keyboard, and is designed to be used as a desktop/gaming machine, rather than as a home server.
I looked into this recently, and wasn't able to find a DockStar for sale locally. It seems that the reason you could buy them for so cheap was that they were being discontinued. Which is too bad, as it sounds like a very nice piece of hardware.
If you want to teach kids about hardware, wouldn't it be better to supply them with something slightly larger where they can install the CPU, RAM, etc. Perhaps supplied as a kit. At least that way they can at least identify the different components that make a computer what it is. They might also have a choice between selection different components, say a memory card vs. a small laptop hard drive, network cards, etc. As a learning tool, I think that'd be better value for $25 than a tiny USB stick sized thing. I think the fun of assembling would outweigh the coolness of being tiny.
But then you cannot crack it open and actually see the components that make the thing run. If this is about educating kids on computers I think that it is really useful to be able to see where each part of the system lives and what it looks like.
I kind of doubt the utility of that with a heavily compacted system like this. I can't find any info on the chipset, but it wouldn't surprise me if the ARM SOC included the graphics driver as well, for instance.
For $25 a kit, there's no reason why you couldn't give one to each student (or have them buy it as part of their stationary requirements). I'm sure they're not going to destruct their own little project.
Sorry, but how does this teach kids how computers work? What you do is educate them about boolean algebra, then explain how different boolean components can be bought in a microchip. After that you explain how large combinations of those make up something which can process 0's and 1's and thus (which they should already know by then) strings of 0's and 1's.
The brighter kids will already start trying to make something 'work' out of that. You continue further about how a CPU works, completely in the language of boolean components. And then they get to design and build one themselves.
That will really teach and show them there is no magic and how it works. Even with the insanely small and complex systems you have now, you can rest assure that in the core they are basically just like the one you made when you were in school.
This kind of practical way of working with hardware (even simulated), gives a lot more pleasure and teaches kids computer hardware design, cpu design, microcodes, assembly and tons more.
I was taught from 'Micro computers' by A.J. Dirksen (ISBN 9789021015934); it (+ the teacher) gave me enough insight to quickly learn Z80 assembler, 68k assembler and add / replace hardware on my '80s computers.
EDIT: I forgot; it would be really stupid to not release this to the masses. Everyone wants one, but only the kids can it; I agree with the rest here; that makes no business sense. Charities are businesses too.
This is neat. Now we need some Linux environments for kids to make cool stuff. LÖVE [1] is a neat Lua-powered game development library, but it's fairly source-code oriented, which may be a barrier for some kids. When I first learned programming, Game Maker [2] was extremely useful. It had a drag-and-drop GUI which was easy enough to mess around with until figuring out how to do things in it's built-in (and extremely forgiving) programming language.
I've used Greenfoot [1], BlueJ [2] and Processing [3] successfully with High School kids, and they all run on Linux. Squeak Smalltalk [4] is another possibility. I've had pretty good luck with Game Maker, but have not tried LÖVE.
I like the idea, but I don't think the place for this device is in schools.
In fact, I hope computer science never gets into high school curriculum, it will only make students hate programming. Just look at math. Programming is even harder; and chances are if you're a programmer you're not really likely to become a high school teacher. Conversely most high school teachers will not know how to program.
> Just look at math.
> Programming is even harder;
Wow. There's someone who has a substantially different idea from mine as to what constitutes math, what constitutes programming, and what constitutes "hard."
> ... chances are if you're a programmer you're
> not really likely to become a high school teacher.
Ditto mathematician. Most high school teachers I know of who are teaching math have no idea what math is really about.
> Conversely most high school teachers will not
> know how to program.
"I hope computer science never gets into high school curriculum, it will only make students hate programming. "
I'm a bit of touch at 41, but are you sure that it isn't already available as an elective for students? Perhaps you meant making it mandatory, which I agree would probably not be very productive.
I took programming in High School, but back then it was all using BASIC. We learned the concepts of variables, memory, loops, and even simple algorithms. And if we finished our homework ahead of the rest of the class, we got to play games. Quite the motivating factor for me at the time.
Computer science is an optional part of the high school curriculum in Israel. Depending on which matriculation exams you take, the classes teach basic .NET, Java, or Assembly.
There's room for improvement, but the classes are widely successful. I have a number of friends who learned to program from high school alone, without a serious effort to learn additional material by themselves.
I had computer science and electrical engineering in my high school, they taught the CS majors c++ and the EE majors do networking (what was then the ccna) and both of us got digital logic. I was an EE who loved both, I'm very very happy I had this available to me. So were most of my friends. It was the first kind of classes where we could be good at it and see a purpose.
But programming is easier to teach, because you have visible results. It's much easier to get kids excited about writing a Tetris clone than calculating a derivative.
Except that in each class there are going to be, at best, one or two people who can reach that level of programming competence. The vast majority of students struggle to make the LOGO turtle do a Z-shaped movement, it's totally unrealistic to expect them to get to the level of writing Tetris within 1 or even 2 years of 1 hour a week programming education.
This is a $100 mobile phone without the baseband, WiFi, Bluetooth, screen, casing, battery, sensors, buttons, microphone, and speaker. I guess $25 sounds about right.
It would be better to give away cheap feature phones and a pair of headphones. Connectivity and content is more important than the size of the display. Even a system that can only do audio would be an amazing educational tool with the right content. An mp3 of a story or a lesson is content rich, a small file, and very cheap to play.
I did look at the images, and I already figured out that this $25 computer has USB and HDMI outputs.
I don't see how most keyboards, mouses, and monitors will be able to connect to it.
This device has one USB output. A mouse and keyboard will need one USB output each, so to use this $25 computer you need to buy an additional device that allows the connectivity of multiple accessories. Not all keyboards and mouses connect via USB, so some users will have to buy new keyboards and mouses just to use this "cheap" computer.
And not all monitors will be able to connect via HTMI. Users with another kind of monitor will need to buy some additional technology that allows these other monitors to plug into the $25 computer.
So how do I connect my equipment into this computer? It's not obvious just by looking at the picture.
Unpowered USB hubs cost nickels these days, and I don't think I've seen a new mouse or keyboard that isn't USB for nearly a decade (PS/2 -> USB converters are similarly dirt cheap anyway...)
Additionally, any new monitor for the past few years ships with HDMI.
I've got to say though, if you succeed in making a computer so cheap that people complain "but I have to buy a mouse made in the current or previous decade???", then you've done a damned good job.
> Additionally, any new monitor for the past few years ships with HDMI.
Also, all monitors besides the cheapest / oldest models will have DVI input, which you can easily get from an HDMI port. The only displays you can't easily drive from this device are those which only take VGA input.
I would like to see some other concepts taught using these devices. Specifically clustering, meshing, cloud etc.
You get a bunch of these devices and arrange them into a cluster/cloud of nano-nodes and teach kids (teens) how to setup clusters of webservers, memcache, micro-dbs etc.
You effectively use the devices to teach large technical infrastructure with tiny physical representations.
Here is how I would do it:
I would whiteboard out a network diagram showing the different layers of tech infrastructure in contemporary cloud designs.
Draw the nodes and connections.
Define the role of nodes in each layer:
Firewall, load balancer, web server, memcache, app server, db server
Then do a micro-config for each of these and run them on the little buggers.
Get velcro tape and tape them onto the diagram in the appropriate location.
Physically wire them all together.
Have it run a website that the students build.
Run analytics...
This would be the ultimate in showing them how The Tubes actually provide them with the data they view every day.
By drawing this, then physically attaching the units to the diagram and running it there will be ZERO confusion and I guarantee that every student will grok the internet more fully.
The thing does not need to be high performance - but it does need to be fault tolerant.
Have the students pull devices out while its running and they are watching monitoring. Have some subjectively F5-ing the little site they made while you drop a few nodes.
Hell, I am ready to do this... anyone want to help me get some of these devices/similar devices?
If pretty much every home has a PC, if the schools teaching ICT have computers then how is this going to make people 'learn computers' better?
Would kids be more turned on by this than by, say, developing apps for android phones?
HDMI and DVI are interchangeable for this purpose; most computer displays manufactured in the last 5+ years have DVI ports. With a $10 adapter they can use the screen from their parents' crusty old Dell.
I'm guessing the idea is to provide a throwback to the days when computers were more hands-on and more nuts-and-bolts (think Apple II era). If the computer itself only costs $25 and boots from MicroSD then you can let students have their own and customise them with things like soldering new connections to it, mounting it on a robot, making very simple games, etc.
developing apps for android phones?
I guess now that Android phones are coming down under $100 as well then this is becoming a possible alternative. You don't get the "nuts and bolts" aspect of it, but you do get to teach both programming & fun.
I know I shouldn't query downvotes but can the downvoter(s) explain how this will address the problem he outlined (ie schools teaching people how to use MS Office rather than teaching computer science)
It gives developers a single hardware target built on open source software that can be safely modified at any level without messing with a families or schools expensive computing systems.
The OLPC Hardware could have been a huge commercial success if it had been gone into production soon after the orignal presentation. But no, it needed Acer and their EEE-PC to satisfy that demand.
Why develop a "universal purpose something" specifically for children? You're not a child anymore so its way easier to build something YOU want than imagine what exactly a child wants or needs. In fact, I'm sure this guy wants the USB-PC more than anyone else on the planet. Also, if you mass produce you bring down prices anyway.
But most important, everyone knows what children want in general: They want to be just like their adult idols! Don't tell kids: "This is for you. I wish I had it when I was a kid. Now, have fun, while daddy works on his Mac."