What are your guys views, on the raspberry pi? Tons of kids in my school are like "OMG IT'S LIKE A COMPOOTER YOU CAN PROGRAM YOURSELF LOOK I MADE IT SAY HELLO WORLD IN PYTHON" now don't get me wrong, everyone needs to start somewhere, it's just why with this, what's wrong with just installing linux on your laptop, it's just a slow linux computer. As far as I can tell it's only use is teaching intermediate programmers lower level stuff when they start using the GPIO pins and such.
It's feasible to furnish a whole class of students with a standard machine to learn programming using a Raspberry Pi. It's not always feasible to ask students to buy a laptop computer if they don't have one. With a Raspberry Pi, students can do their development on a school computer then transfer the results to their Pi.
As for possible applications for the Pi, here is a list:
Flawless 1080p playback
Hardware decoding for all the major video & audio formats
5.1 Surround sound with DTS or Dolby Digital using HDMI pass-through
Apple AirPlay support (play straight from your iPhone/iPad to the TV)
Stream content straight from the Internet
A full vehicle diagnostic computer with a USB OBD2 adapter
Digital radio in the car with a USB DVB-T adapter
Have Internet in the car with a USB 3G Dongle
A media player with a 32GB SDHC card and XBMC
Add a relay and turn on and off anything from IP.
Add a USB webcam and monitor from afar.
Add environmental sensors and build your own EMS
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Anonymous2013-05-28 9:01
Back in my day we built our own computers, with wire wrap or a soldering iron. Now get off my lawn!
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Anonymous2013-05-28 9:38
not x86, no thank you
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Anonymous2013-05-28 10:05
This code runs on a Unisys (Burroughs) A-series mainframe. This program has NOT been tested due to the inability to locate the necessary compiler.
// the main program (this is a comment)
BEGIN
FILE F (KIND=REMOTE);
EBCDIC ARRAY E [0:11];
REPLACE E BY "HELLO WORLD!";
WHILE TRUE DO
BEGIN
WRITE (F, *, E);
END;
END.
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Anonymous2013-05-28 10:13
>>11
Every PROGRAM must have an END as its last statement. The END of the program must be punctuated with a period. This is the only place that a period is used to punctuate a Pascal statement.
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Anonymous2013-05-28 23:58
>>8
As for possible applications for the Pi, here is a list:
Flawless binary blob playback
Hardware decoding for all the binary blob formats
5.1 Surround sound with DTS or Dolby Digital using binary blob pass-through
Binary blob support (play straight from your iPhone/iPad to the TV)
Stream binary blobs straight from the Internet
A full binary blob diagnostic computer with a USB OBD2 adapter
Binary blob in the car with a USB DVB-T adapter
Have binary blob in the car with a USB 3G Dongle
A binary blob with a 32GB SDHC card and XBMC
Add a binary blob and turn on and off anything from IP.
Add a USB webcam and Broadcom can monitor you from afar.
Add binary blob sensors and build your own RMS
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Anonymous2013-05-29 0:27
>>13
Open source is for people too stupid to understand machine code.
It's feasible to furnish a whole class of students with a standard machine
Guess what, there already IS a "standard machine". It's called a PC! You can get used hardware for free and people learning programming do NOT need the latest and greatest, 2-3 year old machines are getting thrown out all the time by some wasteful bastards! In fact that's already far faster (P4/Core/i7 level) than they should ever be starting with - a 486 or Pentium is more like it. Encourages them to actually write efficient code.
The RPi is a 100% proprietary smartphone SoC. I'm almost disappointed that someone didn't leak a datasheet yet. In a few years when it goes out of production maybe some people will hack it and get more life out, but otherwise they're just going to end up in landfills just like smartphones, and no one will know any more about how to use them.
A PC isn't like that. You can get documentation on just about any part on them or the architecture freely long after they're obsolete. Parts are standardised and interchangeable and the standards are pretty open too. Some things like GPUs are not documented completely but that's where backwards compatibility comes to the rescue. A GTX 680 will work as a standard VGA card if you want to program it and the docs for IBM VGA are everywhere. BIOS is mostly a blob but you don't need to use it, since the hardware is so well documented.
If you really want ARM take a look at TI OMAP. There is really no "standard ARM architecture", all the peripherals are different on each system.
>>19
The point is to get started on hardware hacking using one machine that's affordable and easy to modify - the Raspberry Pi. It's a system on a board with built in GPIO and USB connections so it's far easier to use it in a hardware hack than your average x86 machine. The students of hardware hacking don't require high performance machines to learn their craft, a cheap and practical device like the Raspi is designed for this very purpose.
While it's true that there is no datasheet now for the Raspi, there are software hackers out there who care about freedom and will take the effort to study the system for the sake of the community. I'll be givinig 15 years for the community to mature its understanding about the Pi internals - consider how long it took the Nouveau team to develop their system.
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Anonymous2013-05-29 12:51
The RPi is a 100% proprietary smartphone SoC.
What part of it is smartphone-like? There's no wireless: 3G, 4G, wifi, etc.; only the more expensive model has any networking at all and that's Ethernet. There's no touchscreen, or any sort of display included. Other than the fact that it's small form factor, though it wouldn't be after adding all the external components needed for a phone, I don't see it.
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Anonymous2013-05-29 14:24
Pi is cheap for everyone but me who lives in a shitty country where a $35 model won't go for less than $75.
I wouldn't care to use an old $25 PIII, but where will I get the GPIOs? That's right, it's better to stay with PICs, AVRs and sub-$5 usb programmers.
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Anonymous2013-05-29 15:55
>>27
Get a really old motherboard with ISA slots. Make your own memory mapped IO card with some 74 series logic to do address decoding to a handful of latches.
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Anonymous2013-05-29 18:43
>>27 I wouldn't care to use an old $25 PIII, but where will I get the GPIOs?
how fast do you need yo'ure GPIOs to go, and how many pins do you need?
>>26 I'll be givinig 15 years for the community to mature its understanding about the Pi internals - consider how long it took the Nouveau team to develop their system.
Unless someone leaks out the datasheet for (at least) the GPU architecture, forget it. Just buy a {beagle,panda,cubie}board or a parallella and be done with it.
>>19 The RPi is a 100% proprietary smartphone SoC.
The Pi SoC was originally designed for some kind of graphics card, which is why it's got such a slow CPU combined with a stupidly powerful GPU.
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Anonymous2013-05-30 1:00
I ate a raspberry pie once. It gave me both constipation and diarrhea. Would not recommend.
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Anonymous2013-05-30 1:10
>>32
You ate the whole pie? Typical fatass glutton American. No wonder why your digestive system is so fucked up.
>>19 A GTX 680 will work as a standard VGA card if you want to program it and the docs for IBM VGA are everywhere. BIOS is mostly a blob but you don't need to use it, since the hardware is so well documented.
I know you know better than this. The only reason things like 8259, 8042, and VGA compatibility modes still exist is because 32 bit Windows 7 and earlier require them. Once the retail pipeline for systems with those OSes is flushed, hardware manufacturers will drop support for the compatibility modes so fast your head will spin. Integration testing all that compatibility gunk every cycle is ungodly expensive, and vendors won't pay if they can get away with not doing it.
>>19
I think standard machine in this context means the whole machine is 100% equal; it's not enough to have a x86 machine with different Windows systems and hardware. Delivering a programming lesson is difficult enough in itself, teachers don't need the effort needed to troubleshoot the differences in computing environment.
>>19
>Guess what, there already IS a "standard machine". It's called a PC! You can get used hardware for free and people learning programming do NOT need the latest and greatest, 2-3 year old machines are getting thrown out all the time by some wasteful bastards! In fact that's already far faster (P4/Core/i7 level) than they should ever be starting with - a 486 or Pentium is more like it. Encourages them to actually write efficient code.
Not sure if you see how you're contradicting yourself here.
The RPi is slow (but can be overclocked etc), and can teach efficient programming, that was one of its purposes. It also uses a ton less power than any i7 machine or P4 machine