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Foundation readies $25 computer to seed tech talents

Analog

Lifer
foundationre.jpg



Raspberry Pi wants to inspire young people to start technology careers.
User-focused lessons on how to write letters or enter data on Excel spreadsheets may be fine but the devices will place students on a learning and discovery track closer to computer science than end-user skills. The students would receive these credit-card sized computers and courses would be structured around their use.
A posting on the Raspberry Pi blog this week revealed the announcement that the computers are almost ready, seen as good news by many who have been watching for progress updates.
The posting said the first finished circuit boards had arrived and that test versions are to be put through electrical, software and hardware testing. If all goes well, volume production will kick in and orders for the computers will also be taken early next month.
This week’s arrival of the circuit boards is treated as a milestone, as the bare bones circuit boards are the first to be populated with all the components to go into the finished product.
Mice, keyboards, network adapters and external storage connect via USB hub. The computer can be plugged into a TV or monitor and keyboard.



http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-foundation-readies-seed-tech-talents.html


http://www.raspberrypi.org/
 
ram and hd?

256 MB of RAM... No hard drive. It boots off of an SD card.

I'm hoping that some Chinese company makes a clone of these things for even cheaper. It's a great idea, but the foundation seems to be having problems producing them in volume.
 
Another website said 700mhz ARM.

Supposedly it's a 700mhz ARM A11 with 256mb of RAM. Should be as powerful as an iPhone 3GS would be my best guess. It's a Broadcom BCM2835 single core chip with a dual core media co-processor. It begs to be benched. I can't imagine it's all that powerful at its price point though.

All somebody has done is taken the guts out of a cell phone and marketed it as a "PC". Though $35 is hard to beat.

It'll run Linux. Maybe even an older build of Android. Maybe Froyo or Gingerbread.
 
this experiment has been tried.

computers in nigeria for example😉

"REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

FIRST, I MUST SOLICIT YOUR STRICTEST CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS BY VIRTUE OF ITS NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND 'TOP SECRET'. I AM SURE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR ABILITY AND RELIABILITY TO PROSECUTE A TRANSACTION OF THIS GREAT MAGNITUDE INVOLVING A PENDING TRANSACTION REQUIRING MAXIIMUM CONFIDENCE.
"

😀
 
I've been watching the rpi and it's "officially available" although I believe the first 10K are already out of stock. It can handle 1080p and would probably be nice for smoothwall or a file-server. For <$50, I don't see why I wouldn't at least give it a shot. If it doesn't work out, I'll just donate it to a local tech shop/co-op or school.
 
registered my interest. fun little toy....if it plays hulu/online tv stuff, it could replace a desktop sitting in a closet!
 
registered my interest. fun little toy....if it plays hulu/online tv stuff, it could replace a desktop sitting in a closet!

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you won't be doing high quality streaming video on this thing.

I think it's pretty cool though. I'm trying to think of what cool things I could do with it. One cool application I can think of is a smart control to water our lawn. It could check a weather site every day to see what the weather is. On days that it rains it won't water, hot days it could water more, etc. It would be a cool little project.
 
Explain.

Looks great, would love to have one.

Is there a case/enclosure for this?

router software. Google Smoothwall or pfsense. a couple usb nics and you're good to go. best part, you can have a couple to spare in case the one you're using craps out.
 
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you won't be doing high quality streaming video on this thing.

I think it's pretty cool though. I'm trying to think of what cool things I could do with it. One cool application I can think of is a smart control to water our lawn. It could check a weather site every day to see what the weather is. On days that it rains it won't water, hot days it could water more, etc. It would be a cool little project.

I agree, but hulu steams in a few different qualities. if the gpu does 1080p, and outputs hdmi, i'd like to see what it can actually do.
 
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