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Raspberry PI board


toadstool
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Don't underestimate the people that are actually interested in these things. Seduction is done via the price tag. The rest is just another small ARM10/9/8/7 board. Look at the beaglebone for instance. A lot more expensive, pretty similar, shitty website, no doco - sold out everywhere. instantly.

Had a look at the beagleboard.org site on archive.org for 2008,

and it looks just like it is now? a nice blog, a lot like the RaspberryPI site.

Nothing like that hideous "wiki" and mail archive on the Rhombus Tech Website.

At least the beaglebone site links to a google group for public discussion.

The fact that some of the people involved are T.I. employees helps generate trust for sales too.

You do make a good point about the price tag being seductive though,

but this price tag seems unrealistic to me if it has to fulfil 100,000 orders in one batch.

For that figure I think the site needs to be far more inviting.

Did the beaglebone sales come anywhere close to this figure for their first batch of non-alpha boards?

Worst case scenario is that the price will increase but hopefully will stay "seductive!" :thumbsup:

Shitty website aside, limiting themselves to a PCMCIA form factor will be quite a challenge,

some people reckon there simply isn't the room to have enough layers for traces,

and stability of signals is a concern also.

One of Rhombus Tech guys, user: lkcl addressed some of the concerns and questions here:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/12/17/1429221/pcmcia-computer-project-aims-even-higher-and-cheaper-than-raspberry-pi#comments

There is also a thread about the Rhombus Tech project here, where people talk about potential obstacles.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=1551

Those links should make for some good weekend reading! :thumbsup:

Edit: Some Piccies of populated boards on the RPI Blog and a testing status update! yay!

Edited by Smithy
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What's up with you being so anal lately? :rofl:

Hehe, as you know I'm a bit "spaced out". :thumbsup:

I think spacing out lines in a long post makes it a bit easier to nibble on,

smaller chunks at a time rather than having all the text in one big chunk.

Looking back now, I went overboard with lines 5-10 though. :unsure:

Re: TLDR, this is RPi Admin Jamesh's take on it which I found intersting:

I think they would have trouble making a board with two layers and getting all the interfaces out.

We needed to use a 6 layer board on the Pi to route everything to the edges.

It was very difficult doing the layout for the Raspi on 6 layers, and since this has,

I presume more interfaces to the outside world, the layout is even more complicated.

There is a reason most do things a cetain way is because its the best way - especially when you re talking about keeping the costs down.

Here is a picture of the underside of a 2727 Videocore 3 chip.

The BRCM2835 on the Raspi has more balls but the same pitch.

If you can lay that out on 2 layers, go for it. It would save the foundation quite a bit of cash,

as 6 layer boards are expensive in comparison.

2011-10-01-018.jpg

Edited by Smithy
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I think spacing out lines in a long post makes it a bit easier to nibble on,

smaller chunks at a time rather than having all the text in one big chunk.

Yes, if you separate paragraphs (chunks of thoughts that belong together). However, here I totally agree with nILS - your line feeds destroy all the fancy line breaking that should be going on automatically when I choose to adjust the window width of my browser. There is a reason why it's usually done differently :smile:

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  • 1 month later...

FYI, if you haven't been following progress; there is an abbreviated datasheet for the Broadcom BCM2385 SoC that has just been released. Not bad considering Broadcom is not renowned for being open.

Oh and the first batch of boards will likely be available to buy around the end of February, beginning of March.... though let's wait and see. :ahappy:

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  • 3 weeks later...

This ARM board is close to launch:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

While there's lots of others around, it's price is pretty attractive at around £20 (UK pounds).

Not sure how useful it would be for MIDI projects, but for video or display purposes it looks good.

It has 256MB of RAM anyway (shared with GPU), plus I2C and other required signals on the GPIO port.

Edited by Gilesjuk
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Thanks for the thread merge, I should have searched :)

Looking at the board there's a few limitations, it appears to boot off the SD card. So you can't use that for storage alone, you would need the application code on each SD card. Although that could be a plus point too. Easily swap applications.

Another thing, the ARM core is a little on the old side? it's an ARM11 which is nearly 10 years old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM11

There's been hysteria about it today, websites crashing under the strain of thousands of people buying or pre-ordering. One good thing is the hardware can be produced under licence too.

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  • 1 month later...

This thing is welcome in my house. I'll use a couple for media centers with xbmc. One for automating my fridge, one for viewing food recipes in the kitchen and so on hehe. Very cheap. Ordered one now, gonna be exciting to see if it really is up to the task of media center pc. The only thing that annoys me is the lack of gigabit Ethernet hehe, but of course there is a reason for that too...

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  • 1 month later...
  • 11 months later...

Problematic is, that the community still wasn't able to implement a USB and Ethernet driver for the Broadcom chip, which doesn't rely on (closed source) Linux components.

Patience is a virtue... ;-)

 

Best Regards, Thorsten.

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