
$25 PC alpha board successfully runs Linux - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/25-pc-alpha-board-successfully-runs-linux-20110824/
======
mkup
Interesting.

I'm going to automate my new greenhouse with two Ardiunos + some single-board,
low power computer like this one.

Arduinos will drive motors (window openers, fans etc), analyze data from
temperature/humidity sensors in real time, i.e. "convert" USB port to a bunch
of 5-volt analog and digital signaling lines. 8-bit realtime architecture is
well-suited for that purpose.

32-bit ARM-based computer will drive Arduinos via USB, keep logs on SD card,
act as http server, keep me informed via email, maybe even tweet, and also
download weather forecasts from the Internet. New code will be uploaded to it
via ftp. 32-bit multitasking architecture is well-suited for that purpose.

I was looking at different ARM-based single-board computers recently, all of
them are with ~$150 price tag. This one seems much cheaper. I'm not sure about
its aptitude as a cheap computer for third world countries, but it is indeed
usable as "next-level Arduino". Because 8-bit realtime and 32-bit multitasking
architectures ain't mixable anyway.

~~~
pingswept

      8-bit realtime and 32-bit multitasking architectures ain't mixable anyway.
    

That is some wisdom, right there.

I'm working on an ARM board (<http://rascalmicro.com>) that plugs directly
into an Arduino. If you're serious about building this system for your
greenhouse in the next few months, I'd love to have you as a beta tester. My
email is in my profile if you're interested. If not, good luck with the
vegetation.

~~~
ph0rque
Apologies if you've answered this elsewhere, but what is the Rascal Micro
ballpark price? Is it going to be similar to Raspberry?

~~~
pingswept
The Rascal will cost around $150, though I'll lower the price if I can figure
out how to do it. I'm a little skeptical of the Raspberry Pi being sold at $25
in reasonably small quantities. But, if they can pull it off, I'll be
delighted, because it will mean I probably can too.

One of my beta customers has a demo up at <http://angerlights.com> that is
pretty amusing and demonstrates the Rascal's basic functions. All the code is
on Github too: <https://github.com/rascalmicro>

If you want to try a Rascal in person, and you happen to be in New York, I'll
be doing a demo at the Open Hardware Summit in NYC in mid-September.

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peterwwillis
With a few minor changes this would be an awesome wearable computer. Android
touchscreen phones are just too impractical to me. (For those who would rage
and say how great touchscreen phones are, go pick up a 15EUR candybar phone
and text someone with T9, then text someone with a touchscreen-only android
phone)

Ditch the Ethernet, add Wifi, GPS and a mic jack (and maybe a riser for a
GSM/GPRS board?) and I would throw away my Android phone. A little eye-mounted
analog HUD and an earpiece with attached mic would be all I need, and speech
to text could do simple commands and transcription for me with maybe a micro-
querty keyboard I could unclip and type on when necessary. Call me crazy but I
think it would be cheaper than a phone and extremely practical for hands-off
interaction. Plus, plug it into a monitor and keyboard and use it as a PC.

~~~
krschultz
'Ditch the Ethernet, add Wifi, GPS and a mic jack'

And the price would no longer be even close to $25

~~~
peterwwillis
TI, CSR, Broadcom, etc have tiny chips which provide multiple rf technologies
(wifi, gps, bluetooth, fm radio) in one. I don't know prices, but if the total
for a prototype was pushed up to $75 it would still be much cheaper than other
alternatives and still within range to replace my phone.

~~~
sciurus
Increasing the cost seems detrimental to their primary goal:

"We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer,
for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer
to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing
world.

Our first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug
into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The
expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system."

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Sukotto
I wish people posting pictures would take the time to include a ruler of some
kind for scale. Looks about 3 x 4 inch, is that right?

~~~
joezydeco
I wish people posting pictures would actually look at what they're posting.

The picture in this article looks to be a Broadcom evaulation board for the
processor they're using (look at the silkscreen). That ethernet jack with
integrated magnetics is $4 alone. There's no way this board is $25.

The actual board looks like this: [http://www.geek.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/raspberry2.jp...](http://www.geek.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/raspberry2.jpg)

~~~
poslathian
Agreed. That _could_ be a dev board (seems pretty dishonest though). I was
thinking it might be advertising. Lots of devboard companies do this - sell
advertising space on the silkscreen to supplement their income on each unit
(see digilentinc.com who does this a TON).

the $25 price point is out of the question unless: A) They sell at or VERY
near cost B) They sell advertising on the PCB C) They are subsidized by a tech
vendor selling them parts at a discount D) They are subsidized by a charity or
an angel E) They are planning on making 100,000 units in one shot.

At least SEVERAL of the above have to be true, or the $25 is just made-up
nonsense.

~~~
icebraining
They say in the blog of the project that the model with Ethernet and 2 USB
ports is $35. The pictures are probably from that model, not from the $25 one.

~~~
poslathian
Even so, I cant find an ARM11 chip for less than 10$ on octopart, and in the
700MHz range its more like 20-30$ just for 1 chip. For qty purchases that can
come down to 7.50, but thats being REALLY generous. I have trouble believing
they can buy a 700MHz (unspecified on their materials and I couldnt get it off
their snapshot either) for less than 15$. The headers and other plastic is at
LEAST 4$, USB connectors alone are almost 1$ in qty 5000.

Add in the passives and other junk, and leave out the ethernet module and we
are talking about a bill of materials of close to $20.

Now add 1.75 for the PCB (qty 5000), 2.50$ for assembly, another $2.00 for
testing, packaging and assorted costs (like shipping raw materials and
finished goods to and from china, since US assembly and PCB costs are at least
3 times what I noted) and the bare per-unit cost is $25.

Dont forget to factor in costs like - uhh - keeping the lights on in their
officepartment - and even if their dev time is free they just cant sell that
product for $25 without outside cash subsidizing the whole thing.

In this business, distributors pretty much demand the product at 25-40%
discount, so if they want to be in shops and catalogs, you have to factor that
in as well.

Consider the raw cost per arduino is probably around 10.50$, they sell 100,000
units a year, and their onboard processor is about 1$ and they have less
overall plastic, passives, and other overhead parts than this thing.

~~~
joezydeco
From reading more into the project, it sure looks like Broadcom is giving this
group a significant helping hand.

Given that Eben Upton is currently a technical director at Broadcom while
simultaneously working on this Raspberry Pi project...maybe I'm not so shocked
anymore. It's actually refreshing to see chipmakers put out cheaper EVKs to
play with instead of $4000 development systems. It's good marketing.

I'd single out TI as the largest culprit of making EVKs hard to get, but I'm
also inclined to believe they've been giving Beagleboard/Pandaboard a helping
hand (like where can you find loose OMAP4s on the market? I sure can't.)

~~~
theatrus2
Broadcom would generally win on making hard to get EVKs. You can't even get
data sheets unless you're a direct 100k unit type of customer. TI will sample
to just about anyone.

Note that the OMAPs are trickier as they expose their memory bus above the
chip - the SDRAM and NAND are mounted on top of the main die as a stacked BGA.
This isn't easy to work with.

~~~
joezydeco
OMAPs are a godsend compared to Freescale i.MX. They still have pages and
pages of design rules in their TRM about how to lay out the RAM busses. In
fact I had Freescale recommend that I just cut-and-paste their reference
design because they couldn't guarantee anyone else's design would ever work.

------
rch
Sometimes designers on HN ask how to get into open source projects... Sounds
like these guys could use a brand database.

<http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=55>

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Could you explain what you mean by a "brand database"?

~~~
rch
Maybe package is a better term? I'm just referring to all of the materials
constituting a brand: logo in various vector formats and configurations
(logo+text, logo only, b/w logo, etc. etc.), fonts, colors (print and web),
usage guidelines, messaging, etc. etc. etc.

Package all those materials together, and you end up with something along the
lines of a database.

~~~
jackmoore
The word you are fishing for is 'identity' or 'corporate identity'.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_identity>

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corin_
Geek.com is very late to the party, see submission of the original source at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822255>

~~~
ukdm
That was the submission into alpha. They have now received their first boards
back from manufacturing and are busy getting Linux and testing out its
capabilities. I'm hoping we see some more videos very soon of the PC in use.

~~~
corin_
Ah I picked out the wrong old HN submission, but my point stands that this is
old news, 12 days old to be exact - see the date on
<http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78>

~~~
ukdm
Apologies, but I don't think Raspberry Pi will mind the extra coverage. I
think we all want this thing to sell like hot cakes and prove there is a
market for gimmick-less, cheap computing that can become part of every school
kids' back-to-school kit.

------
rch
If they list $25 and $35 as price points, then how much could it cost to have
all the components sourced from within 500 miles of where I live? Surely twice
as much, once such a thing is even possible, but something in the neighborhood
of that price point could still move at sustainable volume given the embedded
product opportunities.

I spend around that much every time I stock up on local produce, bison steaks,
the latest micro-brew, etc. - why not hardware too?

~~~
mhd
I'm not sure if you're serious (Pollan vs. Poe's Law), but local electronics
manufacturing doesn't particularly strike me as ecologically and economically
sound. Never mind that you could take this _ad absurdum_ and demand local
mining, which simply isn't possible (as opposed to e.g. local hops, which is
often just bad, but at least feasible).

~~~
rch
Well, not too serious of course -- but with the right approach to
manufacturing, it would be both possible and desirable [1]. I'm similarly
interested in using 3d printers to build enclosures for small electronics like
this.

In fact, I would appreciate being able to head down to some future kinkos and
print out a replacement cell phone case, even if I could have one for pennies
on the dollar if it was shipped over from Malaysia. I'm not (just) being an
eco-hippie either.

but I will just ignore the bit about mining.

[1] <http://www.innovaelec.com/>

~~~
mhd
3D printing and electronics manufacturing strike me as two totally different
animals for most applications. There's a lot of variation in cases and the
like, so this is great if you need it right now, nobody has to keep a
warehouse of that stuff and if you're doing something new (i.e. iterative
design and development), the immediacy can't be beaten. This has a lot in
common with POD books.

For a computer like this, you simply don't gain a lot. It's mostly prefab
components, with a bit of PCB and soldering. No big need for made-to-order,
built from scratch items. You'd get almost nothing out of this, apart from a
"support your local automated shop" deal. The eco impact of transport for
electronics is negligible.

Now, I'm not saying that there isn't a spot for "local electronics", but that
would involve other devices, ones that are highly experimental, customizable
and/or short run. If you'd get things like this (or an embedded systems) with
oodles of different connectors, memory options, different processor subtypes,
or open source hardware (probably FPGA based, to make it more reproducible).
I've been dreaming about stuff like that since I read about "nano-facs" in the
Cyberpunk RPG…

But again, I don't see the big deal for the Raspberry. It makes sense to print
a sole copy of "Best fly fishing sites for Llarregub Creek in late autumn" in
your Kinko's, not to get a copy of the Bible or Harry Potter.

~~~
rch
I see your point, but I'm specifically arguing in favor of supporting local
shops, and I would be more than willing to pay more to do so.

It is just a guess on my part, but I assume a custom fabricator might
appreciate being able to produce a moderate, steady volume of commodity parts,
based on open hardware specs (if they command a premium by virtue of being
'local'). And that same fab would then be more likely to be able to offer a
custom model with, for instance, an integrated FPGA.

I wouldn't expect many people to pay $6K when they could pay $3K, but $150 vs.
$60? I think there's room for that.

~~~
eropple
I think you're well beyond optimistic and into wishful territory. Very, very
few people are going to pay a 150% markup for their gadgetry because "it's
local." You can't get people to pay a 100% markup on _food_ , and that's going
from four to eight bucks, not sixty to one-twenty.

And whoever owns all that big expensive fabrication hardware has to be able to
keep the lights on. (Yeah, a lot of tools have come down in price, but most of
them don't manage the same level of quality of output and now you're asking
them to pay multiples of what they could get elsewhere, for lesser-quality
stuff.)

~~~
mhd
I think the markup would be even higher for this kind of manufacturing.

What you'd need for truly "local" production is some kind of cheap shortcut.
3D printing uses this "bits of molten plastic" process, which isn't exactly
industrial injection moulding, but workable enough. Book print-on-demand
doesn't use offset, it uses relatively cheap and crappy laser and inkjet
printing (and e.g. no hardcover as of yet). I can't think of any universally
acceptable equivalent for electronics (common processor or FCPGA only work for
a certain subset), and the plethora of different connections are beyond any
sane automatic manufacturing concept. In addition, this would to be highly
automated to be profitable, laden with patents and still quite huge. So it's
quite likely that this will be run by a international chain, which kinda makes
the "support your local electro-plutocrat" argument moot. Haven't seen someone
calling for support to their local McDonalds…

This needs some really big manufacturing breakthroughs to properly work, and
given those, the whole world would look quite different.

And we haven't even talked about regulations…

~~~
eropple
Hey, he was the guy saying 150%. Not me. ;) A buddy of mine said 500%+ and
that's probably a lot closer.

------
dholowiski
Hm... might be fun to build a web server cluster (with servers for caching,
db, memcached, load balancing etc) out of these. I don't know how usable it
would be but it would be a great learning experience for a few hundred
dollars.

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sneak
How long until I can boot iOS on my HackintoshTV? (I kid... sort of.)

Seriously though, throw WiFi in there and lock the output down to 720p, and
you've got a $99 AppleTV sans software.

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rplacd
Tantalizing. I wonder how well it holds up to adverse conditions - wouldn't
mind lashing this to a monitor, opening up a dashboard, and forgetting about
it.

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Zomb1
Do you think this will be able to act as an HTPC?

~~~
frodwith
You'd probably need a lot more oomph to render even moderate resolutions of
compressed video.

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putman
An ARM board running Linux. Is this really news?

~~~
ctdonath
What was, not long ago, a multi-million-dollar supercomputer now crammed into
a postage stamp for cheaper than a frying pan, yes.

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wccrawford
What I'd really like to see is the ability to program this like an Arduino.

My Arduino's cool and all, but the extra power you'd get from this for the
same price... Wow.

~~~
Game_Ender
If it's a true linux PC you can just scp/ftp over binaries, just as easy as
you could over USB with an Arduino. What it probably lacks is the digital and
analog IO ports that you can easily access in the Arduino.

~~~
jamesgeck0
The device will have USB and HDMI ports, in addition to a headphone jack.
You'll be able to use it like a (tiny, cheap) desktop PC.

Edit: I'm not sure how easy it'd be to wire up sensors and such to USB. Don't
some of Apple's ear buds send commands over the headphone jack? Does that
require a special jack, or could it be done easily with normal hardware?

Edit 2: Would the GPIOs work for this? [3]

1\. <http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=8>

2\.
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/?age_id=43&mingleforumaction=...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/?age_id=43&mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=67)

3\.
[http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#General_Purpose_Input.2FO...](http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#General_Purpose_Input.2FOutput_.28GPIO.29.2C_I2C.2C_I2S.2C_SPI)

~~~
waitwhat
Sending commands does require a special jack.

