

Eben Upton explains the Raspberry Pi Model A+'s new design - mksaunders
http://www.linuxvoice.com/raspberry-pi-model-a/

======
reitzensteinm
My family had two computers as I grew up - a 486 and a Pentium II. We were
quite poor, and both purchases were a monumental event, made possible by
unexpected windfalls. I shudder to think what would have happened if they
broke prematurely, or the circumstances which led to them being purchased
never came about.

Certainly my career would have been set back many years (I released my first
commercial game - though it made little money - at 15).

I was fortunate enough to be a "have", and get the opportunity to learn
computing from an early age. I'm a digital native. My proximity to the line of
separation makes me think quite a bit about how much worse my life would be
without that initial investment. Especially while I'm playing the guitar,
which I picked up and enjoy playing badly as an adult (with the money I made
from computing), but didn't have access to as a kid. If my talents were in
music rather than computing, I'd be flipping burgers right now.

It's amazing to me that in this day and age you can get a computer good enough
to do serious work on _for the price of my last meal_. You could learn to
program, get contract work, and complete that work entirely from a Raspberry
Pi (and a TV or second hand monitor, kb/mouse etc).

The dropping of the price of entry level computing has been happening for some
time, but we really are to the point that no western kid is missing out due to
the cost alone (there are unfortunately still other reasons). Computing has
long celebrated its meritocratic nature, but being meritocratic for the middle
class and up wasn't ever really something to be proud of. I'm pretty sure by
that yardstick yacht racing is meritocratic, too.

The world will be such a rich place when each child has the ability to
thoroughly search the space of what is potentially interesting to them, and
have the means, encouragement and material available to pursue it while they
are free from the constraints of adult life. I think we're making great
progress there, and it's one of the only aspects of how we are progressing
into the future that I am unreservedly excited about.

As countries get wealthier and costs continue to fall, the trend will continue
globally. I fully expect to end my career being thoroughly outclassed by ultra
talented new kids on the block from Cambodia and Ethiopia, born in a decade or
two, and nothing could make me happier. (If at that point I turn into a grumpy
old man that whines about it when it happens, please do the world a favor and
just shoot me.)

~~~
userbinator
What most people don't seem to realise is that large corporations (and even
schools) discard tons of perfectly functioning PC hardware every day, the vast
majority of which are quite a lot more powerful (P4 or Core level, maybe even
more) and open than an RPi, complete with all the necessary peripherals.

~~~
custardcream
Yes this.

My total computing outlay this year is £70 so far. That's £52 for the Samsung
SSD (840 Evo) which was new, some rubber feet and a couple of keytops for an
X201 I intercepted on the way to the recyclers and £8 for a wireless mouse.

So for that, I got an industrial grade laptop with an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a
120Gb SSD...

That's less than a Pi with a suitable monitor/TV to attach to it.

(I haven't included the MSDN account copy of Windows 8.1 Pro because I didn't
pay for that ;-)

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speeq
Power consumption of the Model A+ with 1Wh sounds impressive. Does the Pi also
have a sleep mode where it draws even less?

Using two Panasonic NCR18650B 18650 batteries (each ~12Wh) and a 3V to 5V
step-up converter it should be able to run for a day!

Add a solar panel + charging circuit and you have a little Linux computer
which is able to run continuously on solar power :)

EDIT: 1Wh is with a monitor plugged in and running a GPU-intensive demo, I
wonder what the power consumption is like without a GUI but just a WiFi dongle
and the Pi-camera sending snapshots periodically.

~~~
pflanze
> and a 3V to 5V step-up converter

You may want to step it up to 3.3V only for the main power supply and do a
little surgery on the Pi to feed it directly to its 3.3V 'rail', foregoing the
5V->3.3V linear regulator. (I'm just saying this from reading the given page,
I haven't done this myself, so YMMV.)

[http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_...](http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Reducing_power_consumption_of_a_raspberry_Pi)

BTW it's not clear to me whether the Pi or the Beaglebone Black use less power
[when idle]. The latter would provide more CPU power, which would make it more
interesting for a general purpose solar computer.

PS. I was thinking about the B+ when writing the above (stupid me, should
actually read the article before posting). The A+ likely has lower power
consumption than the Beaglebone (but also only 256 MB RAM, which is really
going to be limiting for many tasks). Also, perhaps they have replaced the
5V->3.3V linear regulator with a step-down regulator which would be more
efficient (still, doing only one transformation instead of two would give you
a bit lower losses).

~~~
speeq
Thanks! They seem to have replaced the linear regulator with a switching
regulator (which is more efficient) on the A+ & B+ models.

I agree though, doing only one transformation would be more efficient - but
I'm not sure which USB devices would work on 3.3V - it depends on the
individual use-case I guess.

~~~
pflanze
I now noticed that the NCR18650B batteries are Li-ion batteries (i.e. 2.7-3.7V
range for one cell; I was thinking NiMH which are below 1.5V per cell). This
may be harder to regulate to 3.3V as you can't simply choose a step-up nor
step-down circuit because the source voltage crosses the target voltage during
operation; I think I've seen chips that claim to do this but I don't know how
efficiently[1]. You may be better off with the original plan of converting to
5V after all.

[1] well, actually an inverting buck-boost converter should be fine and seems
like it should be as efficient as a step-up
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck-
boost_converter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck-boost_converter)).
Whatever, my lack of enough experience in that area shows.

------
baldfat
I think that the model A is so over looked. I personally am trying to use
these for a monitoring building a mesh system with used usb wifi. For my house
I just need wireless. These fit perfect for the job.

------
shasheene
There's a few new options for cheap, relatively powerful hardware platforms
than also break the $20 barrier. Specifically Mozilla Matchstick, the
Chromecast-like HDMI dongle
([https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-
the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os)) was selling for $12 with free US
shipping in limited quanties, or around $17 for unlimited quantity with
internationally shipping ($85 for 5).

It uses a dual-core Rockchip 3066 SoC (ARM Cortex A9 with Mali-400 GPU), 1GB
DDR3 RAM, 4GB storage and built-in wifi. The downside compared to the
Raspberry Pi model A+ is it's lacking on the IO front (no USB, headphone,
composite video, and presumably no GPIO etc).

~~~
Narishma
No SD card either, and I believe the Raspberry Pi GPU is faster. I also don't
believe it's made by Mozilla.

~~~
shasheene
Yep, you're right. It's an independent company based in San Jose with no
investment by Mozilla: "MatchStick is backed by Chinese hardware maker
aBitCool and other investors, who Chang said he could not disclose. Mozilla is
not one of the investors, Chang said."

I'm not sure whether VideoCore IV is faster than Mali-400, however.

------
SeanLuke
> “If you’re building something with robotics, or essentially any project that
> doesn’t need Ethernet networking, it’s a great fit.”

Hmmm. I use these boards only for robotics. And a primary reason why I pick a
Raspberry Pi is _because_ it has an ethernet port.

~~~
lovelearning
Your robots need an active ethernet connection to function?

~~~
valarauca1
A surprising number of devices offer data acquisition over TCP/IP either in
telnet, or HTTP get requests.

~~~
lovelearning
True, but all the Raspberry Pi's have atleast 1 USB port to which a WLAN
adapter can be attached. Less cumbersome than ethernet cables, unless ethernet
is mandated by competition rules or something. Of course, these may not be
mobile robots at all, in which case ethernet makes sense.

------
keenerd
Looks pretty heavily inspired by the Odroid-W.

~~~
agumonkey
Which in turn was inspired by the rpi
[http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...](http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=g140610189490)

Also, I've seen people stripping rpi to get slimmer profiles, and the A+ is
really close to that.

