Submitted by When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated in an image released by Broadcom . . . they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder.
using a toaster oven to do the flow with masks and paste on stuff NOWHERE near as small — it’s best they put them out pre-built; Unless they make a massive DIP version of that chip it’s just too easy to screw it up unless you happen to have a real fab facility in your garage.
Though a larger board version with more ‘breakout’ pins could be really nice — the people who want to tinker and build with them could really use that sort of thing; See the Arduino and it’s kin.
Sad but good for a laugh the open sores whackjobs are already pouring out of the woodwork bitching about binary distribution and closed source stuff on them… as if that will matter to 99.99% of real people who aren’t DUMB ENOUGH to drink the FSF kool-aid.
Rah, rah, rage against the man over inconsequential nonsense… again someone needs to explain “freedom” to these people.
Edited 2012-02-01 03:17 UTC
There is a shield board that go on top of it and add ~100 GPIO. It should be available with the board, so you can pay a few extra buck to have the Pi and the shield at day 0.
Good to know, but cannae find a link to info on that — where did you see that?
If you want to really know more about the “GertBoard” as it is called. Read these, you will know all there is to know about it:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/411
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/500
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/553
Given that the Pi was originally intended as a cheap programmers board, you must at least see their point?
For me, as long as Linux installs (which obviously it will), I’ll be happy. The fact that Arch has already been ported to it is just the icing on the cake
As said by Laurence, if they market this as a product for ARM developers, they must understand that there are more OSs than Linux on this market.
It is not Raspberry Pi that is at fault though. AFAIK Broadcom do not provide a decent amount of specs on their hardware.
-specs +reference documentation. Stuff that open-source drivers can be built with.
(We may complain with our closed GPU and networking hardware on x86, but the ARM guys have it far worse. On current ARM devices, it seems that the most trivial things (such as text I/O) require binary blobs.)
It’s aimed at being a cheap computer for kids to play with, and hopefully get them interested in programming. There is just a pent up demand for an easy to use ARM board in the developer community.
The community should take care of porting other operating systems to the Pi, but the focus of the foundation is on a easy to use package. Arch Linux plus the Pi board provides an ready environment to begin experimenting.
Yeah, it really is Broadcom’s fault the drivers are blobs. The head guy behind the Pi works for Broadcom and was one of designers of the chip, so FOSS drivers could be written from what is in his head if Broadcom would sign off on it.
I think it will eventually happen, especially if the R-Pi folks put out a second revision with better specs next year (though what you get for the money with this one is quite powerful, just short on RAM for my taste).
Then again, it took Broadcom forever and a day to start releasing source for their old, outdated wifi chipsets, so who knows how long this might actually take?
I think a fully open Pi will happen too. It’s just going to take some time, and the foundation being successful. It would be great PR for Broadcom to support these guys.
The FOSS Pi could be a tier 2 device for more advanced programming.
For a personal machine, I’d like a little more processor and some more RAM as well, but I like how limited it is for a beginner machine. It’s easier to reach the limits of the hardware.
“Sad but good for a laugh”
“the open sores whackjobs”
“pouring out of the woodwork bitching”
“99.99% of real people”
“DUMB ENOUGH to drink the FSF kool-aid”
“Rah, rah, rage against the man”
… you’re not a fan of sensible debating, I gather?
Edited 2012-02-01 19:46 UTC