
Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-reveals-the-final-pcb-design-for-the-25-pc-20111115/
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DanBC
I'm really excited by this project. I think it's a great idea. I very much
hope they sell them to anyone, maybe at a slightly higher price to subsidise
the others.

But there's a _tiny_ [1] hint of regret that modern programming is necessarily
abstracted away from the hardware. When people were using the popular home
computers of the 1980s they would be able to use some version of BASIC, and
then also some machine code if needed. And that wasn't something just limited
to the brightest smartest young programmers; it was above average but nothing
extreme. I learnt Z80 ASM on a suitcase instructional computer, turning fans
on and off or stepping through traffic light sequences on LEDs. Then I made a
resistor ladder DtoA convertor and pushed data out the parallel printer port
for audio. (Something also done by No$GB emulator.)

That seems to be something that children will be missing out on, unless this
project gives them enough boost to then investigate things like arduino or
similar.

[1] Not a criticism in any way of the Raspberry Pi project.

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JamesAn
One of the operating systems that may be ported to the Pi is RISC OS, which
includes a reasonably decent implementation of BASIC
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC>) which itself contains a built-in
ARM assembler.

A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting
randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without
needing to download, install and use a compiler.

We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in
the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered
harmful" sense.

~~~
moomin
Also, if you wanted to learn bare-metal programming, the entire RISC OS Api
was defined in terms of assembler. It's not open source, though.

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joezydeco
If they think this PCB is "packed" they haven't looked hard enough at a
smartphone teardown. Go look at the iPhone 4S teardown:

<http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2>

~~~
r00fus
Difference is the iPhone has insane margins. You want to pay $35 or $100?

~~~
temp5678
It's not the PCB that's expensive. It's the components on it.

~~~
DanBC
That's often not true; PCBs can be a significant cost on the bill of materials
for a gadget.

Amortising the tooling / artwork costs into big volumes helps, but even then
the PCB is usually one of the more expensive items on the parts list.

~~~
easp
Yup, it was interesting reading some of the discussions about the design of
the device. PCB cost was a major consideration. They aren't exposing some of
the I/O pins on the SoC because it would require a more expensive PCB to do
so.

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yellowbkpk
Link to actual blog post: <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/344>

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ctdonath
What's their initial production run going to look like? There's a whole lotta
geeks who will want this - and at that price, they'll want 10. ($250 for more
computers than I'll know what to do with? I'll take 20!)

~~~
polshaw
They spoke of 10k initial run.[1] They have also been considering limiting
purchases per person.

1 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU>

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montecarl
What would be the best way to interface a 2.5" hard drive with one of these? A
USB to sata controller? That seems bulky if you want to have it in one case.
I'd like to find a compact way to add some storage to the device as I am
interested in using it as a media player.

~~~
kennywinker
It's got an SD card slot.

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winter_blue
This is quite awesome. I can imagine many great things coming out of this.
Such cheap computers, will bring computers (and therefore the internet) within
range of many people in developing countries.

One potential problem will be the cost of monitors, which might exceed the
cost of the computers itself :-( But hopefully someone can make cheap monitors
soon..

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joshu
This is like the best-documented vaporware ever. I hope they prove me wrong
soon.

~~~
joezydeco
What doesn't look legit? The PCB silks look typical, the board size is about
right for a small SoC-based design. You just need a _lot_ of space for those
large connectors like SD/MMC and HDMI.

There are other designs recently launched of the same size and capability like
BeagleBone or the Gumstix line.

~~~
kvermeer
The part that's suspicious is the $25 price point (the BeagleBoard is $125,
the BeagleBone is $90, the Gumstix is $150-$250 depending on configuration).
How many products can you name for under $50 (2x the cost of the Raspberry Pi)
that approach its specs and capabilities? Also, they're aiming for user-
friendliness to the point where it is supposed to be an educational product
for young people.

These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be
approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it
quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who
is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is
the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing
spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets
rolling is the shaky part.

Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust
them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust
to Broadcomm.

~~~
beagle3
Actually ...

Roku has something with similar specs for $50 retail (which means they sell it
to retailers at $30 at most). And Apple has something called "AppleTV", which
has a little more hardware on it (wifi, power supply, ir remote receiver +
remote, 8GB of flash), and sells for $90.

~~~
joshu
anyone gotten linux on the roku?

~~~
zachbeane
It runs Linux, just not a Linux they want you to access.

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ctdonath
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the SD card slot.

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knodi
I can't wait to get few of these.

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sneak
Why don't thes people release their files as they work on them? Why don't they
resell the bare SoCs at cost or a slight markup so we can use them for other
projects?

Something has always struck me as fishy about this whole thing.

~~~
tesseract
You couldn't build one yourself anyway, because Broadcom won't sell you parts
or even talk to you unless you're doing volumes like 100k/quarter. And then
you'll probably need to sign an NDA to get the datasheet.

I see the Raspberry Pi project as an attempt by Broadcom to build some
goodwill - but they seem more interested in doing so among society at large by
producing a super-affordable computer for kids, than among nerds by doing an
open source project. That's Broadcom's prerogative and I applaud what they are
doing for what it is.

Personally though, as a hardware hacker, I am more likely to buy similar
products using TI (BeagleBoard) or Freescale (Chumby Hacker Board) or Atmel
parts, as those manufacturers have histories of being a bit more friendly to
hackers, hobbyists, and small volume buyers. The BeagleBoard in particular is
open source, there's development chatter on an open mailing list, and TI sells
the same OMAP SoCs to small volume customers (right down to the possibility of
a hobbyist buying one or two through a distributor, although at that volume
you'll pay $50 for just the bare SoC).

~~~
polshaw
Rasberry Pi is not a project run by broadcom, just using their SoC (and
featuring one of their employees). They are selling the first round to nerds /
hardware hackers, and I doubt many others will choose to pay 4x the price to
keep using the beagleboard.

~~~
tesseract
I understand the project isn't actually run by Broadcom but I think the fact
that Broadcom is selling them chips indicates some level of interest in what
they are doing. They aren't exactly 'just another customer'.

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JoeAltmaier
Cool. Portable. Cheap. Can run Quake II.

But what does that get you? Still need to plug into a monitor, keyboard,
mouse. So you can only use it where those things are.

For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any
computer, and it boots as my computer. That would be portable. Useful for a
student lab, at my Mom's house, in a hotel.

Just a thought.

~~~
beagle3
> For real portability, how about an SD system thumb drive I can plug into any
> computer, and it boots as my computer.

Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9
years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can
run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the
same one, if properly partitioned).

And it's unlikely a hotel or your student lab would actually let you reboot
into your own distribution; once you have control of the hardware (which you
must have), you practically own it from that moment.

CherryPy is actually a much better solution than yours:

Your lab, and your hotel room, is likely to have a screen that can take VGA or
HDMI input - so you've got a display; You can get foldable silicon keyboards
for $10 or so, and a small travel mouse for $10 more. So, for $45, you have
something you can _already_ use at your lab or hotel _room_ , with no one
having to fear you're putting viruses on their system.

~~~
101000101
A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant
coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live
USB/SD sticks.

But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.

Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media
(e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.

Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on
their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share
of their revenue.

If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would
be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.

~~~
DanBC
uh, you can run other OSs on Apple hardware. It's a little bit trickier
because of EFI but it's not hard.

What you can't do (Apple say) is run Apple OSs on non-Apple hardware.

~~~
101000101
I don't want the Apple OS. Remove it completely from the hardware, make the
firmware more friendly to non-Apple OS, then I'll buy more Apple hardware.

Other than NetBSD, I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple
hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it.

But I will investigate. Thanks for the FYI.

~~~
srl
_I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing
Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it._

I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder
to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is
finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if
there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See <http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook> and
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook> .

Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works.
(And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )

~~~
kennywinker
I tossed a ubuntu cd in my MacBook Pro, rebooted holding down option, and it
booted up just fine. Could it be easier?

~~~
DanBC
One thing that could be easier is booting MacBook Pro from USB stick. A
Unetbootin that works on Mac, and builds usb sticks bootable on Macs, would be
good.

Or maybe bootcamp could mention Linux.

~~~
101000101
My preference is to use only the bootloader for the OS I'm booting, as opposed
to a "boot manager" that presents a menu of OS's. I avoid using chaining
techniques the way something like GRUB does. And I don't use MBR's if I don't
have to. Disklabels alone will suffice. So the stick contains only an OS-
specific bootloader and the OS, usually just a kernel with embedded ramdisk or
a loadable kernel module containing a filesystem and userland. I keep it very
simple.

This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?

