Nerds assemble! Raspberry pi close to launch date.
- Thread starter RomanNose
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Soldato
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The educational launch is due for September isn't it? So we're not stealing from kids. Yet.Does anyone else feel bad about taking all the units away from the kids that they were supposed to teach?
Does anyone else feel bad about taking all the units away from the kids that they were supposed to teach?
The first batch was never really intended for kids, hence the lack of case/psu/etc.
The people who have designed/made the Pi are electronics engineers, not software developers. They need to get devices out to as many people as possible and rely on the community to port the operating systems, write device drivers, etc.
The idea is that there will be packages released later which will be easier for kids to use with a nice case, psu, sd card with all required software preinstalled and maybe a mouse/keyboard.
Soldato
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Wait until he's heard of an Arduino!
I'm looking forward to getting the Pi hooked up to my Arduino doing all sorts of weird and dangerous stuff!
This sounds interesting. Are you interfacing through GPIO or USB?
Do you have any specific ideas in mind or just miscellaneous weirdness and dangerousness?
It will be about GPIO, arduino is another of unnecessary complexity. May be helpful for some more advanced things but I am putting my money on a nice shiny software package coming out to take advantage of it.
Only problem is that it's not a real time OS, we will just have to wait and see what the limitations are. Is that a big problem? Probably not as we could interface with arduino.
Only problem is that it's not a real time OS, we will just have to wait and see what the limitations are. Is that a big problem? Probably not as we could interface with arduino.
No, its not just a preorder.
...but dont worry, it's a pre-preorder. You register your interest, then they send you an email link where you can go to preorder.
Oh dear :/ I need to wikipedia a lot of this.
What will you be using it for that requires real time responses?
Soldato
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I placed my pre-order on Saturday, I was one of the first to get a pre-order email from Farnell. There was no clue on the site of a free T-Shirt at the time, nothing at all.
I have sent an email to them, BUT if I don't get a free T-Shirt you will witness the first 'Will it blend - Raspberry Pi' video. Watch this space.
I have sent an email to them, BUT if I don't get a free T-Shirt you will witness the first 'Will it blend - Raspberry Pi' video. Watch this space.
Soldato
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Dwarf fortress nails my desktop at times, and I have a good high end gaming system
Not long, I have built something for it.
Expect it to hit the market soon.
LOL!
Having now read back through this thread, I see that a chap called Marco in Italy has come up with a very interesting concept on the 'official' Raspberry Pi website, which is being discussed in their forum at http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/projects-and-collaboration-general/concept-for-a-case, and also by the man himself at http://marcoalici.wordpress.com/
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Reaal time OS's are used for micro second precision. With desktop opreating systems, you have a scheduler that says when to perform a task. Linux has loads of background processes, taking up cpu cycles. The problems can start in sensing systems, if you had a quadcopter and the program lagged due to another process, it will come crashing down. For some situations, we will have to interface with arduino. We have robot cars using the pi, but for some things we will communicate over serial to an ar duino.
I read somewhere about using a clock crystal for such applications, connected via GPIO to send interrupts to the OS. Also, saying "Linux" casts the net too wide to describe all distros. There will probably be close to bare metal as you can get distros for serious enthusiasts/electronic applications so running a full desktop OS on your quadcopter might not be an issue
Surely if an Arduino (max of 60MHz?) can control a quadcopter, then a Pi (700MHz) could do it even with around 85% of cpu cycles used for background processes?
In fact, i'v seen quadcopters which use an accelerometer from a wii remote. That only has a 100Hz update rate, so does that mean you can keep a quadcopter in the air with only 100 corrections per second?
Surely a 700Mhz cpu would have no problems with that even if it was doing a lot of multitasking?
*I dont actually know what i'm talking about here, just making assumptions (or wild guesses
)