Raspberry Pi computer launched

[SifJar]

Raspberry Pi $35 computer launched​

Six years after the project's inception, we’re nearly at the end of our first run of development – although it’s just the beginning of the Raspberry Pi story. Now we start developing educational tools and initiatives, at the same time as continuing research and development on Raspberry Pi hardware.


Although we are still waiting for units to arrive from China, you can start buying the Raspberry Pi today. We have entered into licensed manufacture partnerships with two British companies, Premier Farnell and RS Components. They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and handling the distribution of our first batches as they arrive in the country. The Foundation continues to make a small profit from each Raspberry Pi sold, which we’ll be putting straight back into the charity.

Source

Surprised no one posted about this yet...Anyway, seems it was available for sale from two different sites, but both were hammered by huge demand and it seems both have sold out of their stock. Apparently the next batch will be in a few months.

To anyone who doesn't know what the Raspberry Pi is, it is a small computer, built on a board the size of a credit card, available for $35. Despite having only officially launched today, various demos of the technology have been floating round the internet for a while. Here's a few YouTube videos to show what it can do:

Spoiler

XBMC on Raspberry Pi
AirPlay on Raspberry Pi
VNC Viewer on Raspberry Pi
Quake III on Raspberry Pi

And an article about some stuff it can do: here

Specs on Wikipedia

 

[Foxi4]

This is quite interesting, reminds me of a similar project, but I can't recall it right now... that said, such a build causes unpleasant implications.

While the board itself is small, it still requires a monitor and some sort of input devices to be connected. If you truly wanted to turn this into a light-weigh portable PC, you're in for some fancy soldering as it is and you'll likely block some of the ports in the process. I didn't pay attention too much, but I don't think that the board had solder points on the PCB that could be used for such a mod so that the ports are intact, did it?

It's definatelly a novelty item... but a Desktop computer, no matter how small, is not something you walk around with often. There should be a clear way to implement an LCD screen and a mini-keyboard into this setup, that'd fix all the issues I see with it.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

This is quite interesting, reminds me of a similar project, but I can't recall it right now... that said, such a build causes unpleasant implications.

While the board itself is small, it still requires a monitor and some sort of input devices to be connected. If you truly wanted to turn this into a light-weigh portable PC, you're in for some fancy soldering as it is and you'll likely block some of the ports in the process. I didn't pay attention too much, but I don't think that the board had solder points on the PCB that could be used for such a mod so that the ports are intact, did it?

It's definatelly a novelty item... but a Desktop computer, no matter how small, is not something you walk around with often. There should be a clear way to implement an LCD screen and a mini-keyboard into this setup, that'd fix all the issues I see with it.

It was a PC the size of a USB wasn't it? Or perhaps it was just this...I dunno, I feel like I remember the same.

This is pretty cool, I wouldn't mind taking one of these and building a portable PC out of it. Wouldn't be too hard, you could probably mod a portable DVD player for a screen/mini keyboard.

 

[mocalacace]

Unfortunately they're all sold out now. They have atleast been sold out by 8:00am when I checked this morning

 

[raulpica]

Craaaap. I wanted one

I mean, MAN. It's made from the guy who made Frontier on the Amiga, David Braben. And I'm too much of an Amiga fun to let this one slide

I could also turn it into a super-small HTPC connected directly to my TV. Add a little bluetooth USB antenna, and bam, you've got an awesome emulation HTPC.

 

[BlueStar]

This is quite interesting, reminds me of a similar project, but I can't recall it right now... that said, such a build causes unpleasant implications.

While the board itself is small, it still requires a monitor and some sort of input devices to be connected. If you truly wanted to turn this into a light-weigh portable PC, you're in for some fancy soldering as it is and you'll likely block some of the ports in the process. I didn't pay attention too much, but I don't think that the board had solder points on the PCB that could be used for such a mod so that the ports are intact, did it?

It's definatelly a novelty item... but a Desktop computer, no matter how small, is not something you walk around with often. There should be a clear way to implement an LCD screen and a mini-keyboard into this setup, that'd fix all the issues I see with it.

The idea is that it's given to school kids so all of them can afford a simple computer and learn to code on an arm device (you can just plug it into a tv and a keyboard is a few pounds)

Growing up with stuff like the BBC Micro was great for the last generation of programmers, but now kids in classrooms are using extremely powerful machines but they're only taught how to use them and have very little idea what actually makes them work.

I think it's a great idea for every child to be able to have a system they can carry in their pocket and code on, especially of there's only one shared pc at home they might not get to use that often.

 

[jimmyemunoz]

If you signed up they will let you know when it's for sale, at least that's my understanding.

 

[pyromaniac123]

Unfortunately they're all sold out now. They have atleast been sold out by 8:00am when I checked this morning

They were available for sale at 1:00am gmt but no one at raspberry pi decided to annouce that though.

edit: managed to pre order one at farnell though.

 

[FAST6191]

We were talking about it on IRC earlier. This price point is somewhat below the pogo/sheeva plug stuff and similar ( http://www.reghardware.com/2012/02/28/fxi_technologies_offers_cotton_candy_linux_pc_on_a_stick/ , http://beagleboard.org/ ) devices as well as being about the same price as the likes of the arduino and teensy (granted they are all still well within the toy shopping price range) making it a very attractive proposition although I was not sufficiently driven to try getting one today (probably for the best as I hear neither site was up for handling the load).

I am not especially thrilled about the broadcom chip (it is rather closed from an architecture and instruction set standpoint, or at least it was last time I heard which was several months back) but I am usually of the "does it work" mindset so I reckon I can overlook that.

 

[yuyuyup]

you could prob buy one on ebay for a 8 times the price

 

[jimmyemunoz]

@Foxi and Pinkie: I think it's called a Beagle Board.

 

[BORTZ]

Wow. Some of those videos blow my mind. Thats so cool, I seriously want one.

[stupid question]
How powerful is it? I mean compared to a mobile smart phone, lets say the iphone 4S, does it beat that?
[/stupid question]

 

[raulpica]

Wow. Some of those videos blow my mind. Thats so cool, I seriously want one.

[stupid question]
How powerful is it? I mean compared to a mobile smart phone, lets say the iphone 4S, does it beat that?
[/stupid question]

iPhone 4S is a lot more powerful (especially in the graphics part)

It might have some advantages in hardware decoding though, depending on the SoC used.

 

[BORTZ]

Ok sweet. Its just an ARM processor right?

 

[SifJar]

This is quite interesting, reminds me of a similar project, but I can't recall it right now... that said, such a build causes unpleasant implications.

While the board itself is small, it still requires a monitor and some sort of input devices to be connected. If you truly wanted to turn this into a light-weigh portable PC, you're in for some fancy soldering as it is and you'll likely block some of the ports in the process. I didn't pay attention too much, but I don't think that the board had solder points on the PCB that could be used for such a mod so that the ports are intact, did it?

It's definatelly a novelty item... but a Desktop computer, no matter how small, is not something you walk around with often. There should be a clear way to implement an LCD screen and a mini-keyboard into this setup, that'd fix all the issues I see with it.

It has at least two USB ports, so you can plug in a keyboard and mouse and has built in HDMI out and I think also VGA out. There's no need to do any soldering to make use of it. You could probably just build a case for it and connect to those ports internally if you wanted to build a "portable PC".

Wow. Some of those videos blow my mind. Thats so cool, I seriously want one.

[stupid question]
How powerful is it? I mean compared to a mobile smart phone, lets say the iphone 4S, does it beat that?
[/stupid question]

The processor is 700Mhz and it has 256MB RAM. I'll try find some fuller specs in a minute.

EDIT: It can, for example, play HD video without any problems (lending itself to being a media centre quite nicely)

EDIT: Specs on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications

 

[BORTZ]

This is quite interesting, reminds me of a similar project, but I can't recall it right now... that said, such a build causes unpleasant implications.

While the board itself is small, it still requires a monitor and some sort of input devices to be connected. If you truly wanted to turn this into a light-weigh portable PC, you're in for some fancy soldering as it is and you'll likely block some of the ports in the process. I didn't pay attention too much, but I don't think that the board had solder points on the PCB that could be used for such a mod so that the ports are intact, did it?

It's definatelly a novelty item... but a Desktop computer, no matter how small, is not something you walk around with often. There should be a clear way to implement an LCD screen and a mini-keyboard into this setup, that'd fix all the issues I see with it.

It has at least two USB ports, so you can plug in a keyboard and mouse and has built in HDMI out and I think also VGA out. There's no need to do any soldering to make use of it. You could probably just build a case for it and connect to those ports internally if you wanted to build a "portable PC".

Wow. Some of those videos blow my mind. Thats so cool, I seriously want one.

[stupid question]
How powerful is it? I mean compared to a mobile smart phone, lets say the iphone 4S, does it beat that?
[/stupid question]

The processor is 700Mhz and it has 256MB RAM. I'll try find some fuller specs in a minute.

EDIT: It can, for example, play HD video without any problems (lending itself to being a media centre quite nicely)

Awe man thats so awesome. Are these like debugging boards too? Like can you program specially for them and make i do special stuff?

 

[raulpica]

Ok sweet. Its just an ARM processor right?

Yep, just like the ones every smartphone out there uses.

 

[FAST6191]

Some specs I saw http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/28/raspberry_pi/ although I believe the A board is now rocking the same amount of ram. Technically it is a custom broadcom system on a chip (SOC) http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835 (the locked down part I was raising an eyebrow at) but it does have an ARM core inside that which can be used/is used. What would be nice to see is some reverse engineering of such a thing, I know we have the likes of this but something like this would be awesome to see.

 

[pwsincd]

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video.
Features

• Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
• GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• 256MB RAM
• Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
• 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• HDMI socket
• USB 2.0 socket
• RCA video socket
• SD card socket
• Powered from microUSB socket
• 3.5mm audio out jack
• Header footprint for camera connection
• Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

 

[Valwin]

i wanted one tooo