
Raspberry Pi Model A (the $25 one) finally on sale in US - iProject
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/raspberry-pi-model-a-you-know-the-25-one-finally-on-sale-in-us/
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bnycum
I picked up a Model B from Amazon earlier this month, here in the US. I have
been really impressed with it, even though I paid ~$48. Very impressive device
in such a little package. I used mine to make a WiFi garage door opener with
node.js backend and iOS app to open our garage doors from our phone. So many
more projects in mind.

Shameless plus as I just wrote a post about my project this weekend.
[http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-
raspber...](http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspberry-
pi/)

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namwen
Really cool. Could you point me towards any resources for learning the
electronics side of this? I've had my pi for awhile and want to get into the
hardware aspect of it more, but have zero experience.

~~~
bnycum
I don't know too much about hardware, enough to solve simple issues like this.
The relay simply closes the circuit as if I pressed the wall switch. The Pi
has header pins with power, ground, and programmable pins. Check out the
WiringPi page though. <https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/>

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droithomme
So, only one vendor, and they state back orders not accepted, and they state
they have 0 in stock.

Which means it's not really on sale for $25 in the US.

I could make the same claim myself, that I am selling them for $25, don't have
any in stock, and don't accept backorders. They wouldn't make it really for
sale unless I am actually accepting $25 and shipping out boards. It might be
convenient though if I give people a link to where I am selling other items,
that's a lot of free incoming traffic without having to pay Google for AdSense
clicks.

This is just cheap dishonest advertising for the company. A lot of people
visiting the link will buy something else. Someone there has figured out a
good way to make money is send out press releases to the tech press about
their desirable but unavailable non-sale item, and hope for a bite. They got a
bite - Cyrus Farivar at ArsTechnica fell for it. Sure, they had 50 in stock
that were sold instantly. 50 that this company no doubt bought for more than
$25 each and either sold as a loss leader, or simply charged more for shipping
than they paid.

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Paul_D_Santana
It has been amazing watching what people have done with the Model B. I'm
actually considering picking one up just to play around with web development
and all these mysterious languages I hadn't heard of before reading Hacker
News, ie the *.js languages, and a personal trial of Django vs Rails.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Your current computer almost certainly will run a Linux virtual machine with
more than enough performance to try out Django, Rails, Node and more, for
free. It'll also be much closer to the kind of environment you would likely
deploy on (64 bit x86 vs 32 bit ARM).

That's not to say you shouldn't get a Raspberry Pi, quite the opposite - just
don't let the lack of one stop you from doing what you want, today!

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NoPiece
Good advice - might be worth just trying a micro EC2 instance from Amazon,
which is part of their free tier.

<http://aws.amazon.com/free/>

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andrewf
Micro instances have savage CPU throttling with a little bit of leeway. What
this translates into is you'll compile something biggish (eg node.js), things
will seem fine for a few minutes, then the machine appears to freeze. *

If you want to keep a machine around that you know doesn't do much, it's the
cheapest option on AWS. But it's no fun if you're doing unplanned, interactive
work. Even for the first use case, you want to fire up a bigger instance to do
things like package installation, then restart as a micro once its configured.

(* I experienced this a year ago. Others report similar things.)

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jiggy2011
What I would like to see is something like a Raspberry pi, but without any of
the video/usb outputs or GPU/Soundcard.

So just a tiny server running Linux with an ethernet port. I you can get the
pi down to $25 you could probably get such a thing down to $15 or so.

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tinco
Removing the ethernet port is one of the things they did to get the cost down
to 25 dollars. The gfx/video you get for free with the CPU, so I dont think
you're right.

The ethernet was expensive because it consisted of two components, an ethernet
chip and a usb hub. A cool side effect of the hub not being in the A is that
you can use it as a USB slave too. This is very handy if you want to use the
Pi to make a pheripheral device.

~~~
jiggy2011
I wonder if just providing a wireless chip would be cheaper than just
providing ethernet?

There must be some cost saving in just removing the video connectors from the
board, though I'm not sure if it's any cheaper to get an ARM CPU without an
inbuilt GPU.

~~~
tinco
I think the difference is that you perhaps pay 2cts for a video connector
which is directly connected to an output your cpu has and a few euro for a
networking chip that requires high quality crystals etc.

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film42
Can anyone give a legit reason why they can't just keep them coming? I mean,
we're all gonna buy them.

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silveira
Aaaand it's gone.

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fakeer
Model A is very restrictive than the B, if you are even slightly serious to do
sth of little weight with it. I wonder if A can withstand always-on torrent
and/or a connected hard disk which is constantly filled by CrashPlan or Time
Machine. One USB port is another big restriction. Kills my idea of making it
work with two hard disk(without using a hub).

PS. It hurts to think that I am not buying it(B) because it costs ~$60
here(IN) and the original price being $35. Maybe I would have bought it if it
was released for $60 and available here for the same cost. Played with it at a
friend's place though.

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tinco
The model B achieves the 2 usbs and an ethernet port by having a builtin hub
this means your 2 hdd's compete both with eachother and with the network for
bandwidth so your no hub constraint doesnt make sense.

