It would be cool for nice little embedded applications that require a little more power than your average ATMega microcontroller, though. I look forward to seeing what comes of it; maybe it will even incentivize the Arduino team (Sparkfun is complicit, too) to drop their ridiculous $25 price-point for a $3 uC, a board, and a few assorted components.
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KermMartian wrote:
It would be cool for nice little embedded applications that require a little more power than your average ATMega microcontroller, though.
There are already plenty of cheap microcontrollers out there that are more powerful than the popular 8-bit AVR line; the main difficulty is finding them in hobbyist-friendly DIP footprints. The 16-bit dsPIC line is rather nice, for example, and the you can do some very impressive things with the eight 32-bit cores in the Parallax Propeller. I do rather like 8-bit AVRs, however, as they are inexpensive, easy to get hold of, are usually good enough for my needs and have unrestricted free development tools.
Unfortunately (and despite the outrageous markup) people seem to have been rather blinded by the success of the Arduino to look into alternatives.
I'm glad you agree about the outrageous price-point, Ben. 
I agree that people have been blinded by it; I think a lot of its users don't even realize that it's one of a much larger category of easily-used microcontrollers, although I think the MSP430 at least made small inroads.
I agree that people have been blinded by it; I think a lot of its users don't even realize that it's one of a much larger category of easily-used microcontrollers, although I think the MSP430 at least made small inroads.
*bump* So at this point it looks like it's still real, and is aiming for a late November or early December release. They seem to be making two versions, a Model A and a Model B. Both have USB, HDMI, component video, microUSB for power, a 700MHz ARM11 in a Broadcom SoaC; the model A has 128MB RAM, while the B has 256MB RAM and an Ethernet port.
KermMartian wrote:
They seem to be making two versions, a Model A and a Model B.
A nice nod to their heritage, I presume. benryves wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
They seem to be making two versions, a Model A and a Model B.
A nice nod to their heritage, I presume. 
Thanks for enlightening me, Benryves.
Is anyone planning on getting one or both? I should mention that this topic came up again because of the Beaglebone board, aiming for the same sort of users, but with somewhat more powerful hardware overseen by a Cortex A8.
I'd love to get one eventually, for the aforementioned lapel pin camera, and possibly some other ideas.
DShiznit wrote:
I'd love to get one eventually, for the aforementioned lapel pin camera, and possibly some other ideas.
I bet a lot of people will; why get an Arduino for a project with minimal or no external GPIO interface needs when you can get something with a vastly more powerful system and set of interface options for the same price? DShiznit wrote:
Hell, I could build a small robot with full AI with those specs.
You could indeed, at least from a control systems standpoint. You'd be hard-pressed to actually control a robot and get input from it, though, unless you find yourself a nice external GPIO board of some kind. Unless there's going to be a way to tap the data/address buses or something, which would be amazing.
*bump* If you take a look at the photo of the Raspberry Pi below, it actually has I2C, SPI, and a whole bunch of GPIO pins! huzzah.
http://www.retrocomputers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_2544.jpg
^Gianthuge image. Check out J11 through J14 and also J2.
http://www.retrocomputers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_2544.jpg
^Gianthuge image. Check out J11 through J14 and also J2.
You neglected to mention the JTAG header, J1. That's one connection I'm a fan of.
The tight parallel spacing on the traces going to J12 and J13 implies to me that they're supposed to carry some differential signal, but I don't know of any common buses that would do that and be broken out just to pin-headers. I2C or UARTs might be plausible, but that seems like an awful lot of channels just for those.
The tight parallel spacing on the traces going to J12 and J13 implies to me that they're supposed to carry some differential signal, but I don't know of any common buses that would do that and be broken out just to pin-headers. I2C or UARTs might be plausible, but that seems like an awful lot of channels just for those.
Tari wrote:
You neglected to mention the JTAG header, J1. That's one connection I'm a fan of.
The tight parallel spacing on the traces going to J12 and J13 implies to me that they're supposed to carry some differential signal, but I don't know of any common buses that would do that and be broken out just to pin-headers. I2C or UARTs might be plausible, but that seems like an awful lot of channels just for those.
Ask and you shall receive:
The tight parallel spacing on the traces going to J12 and J13 implies to me that they're supposed to carry some differential signal, but I don't know of any common buses that would do that and be broken out just to pin-headers. I2C or UARTs might be plausible, but that seems like an awful lot of channels just for those.
J2: UART serial console (debug)
J11, J14: 1.27mm header providing ~16 GPIOs at 3v3, I2C and SPI interfaces and ARM JTAG.
J12: 1.27mm header providing DSI interface
J13: 1.27mm header providing MIPI CSI-2 interface
J14: ??
Here's a fantastic piece of news I hadn't seen before: someone's working on getting RISC OS to run on the device.
benryves wrote:
Here's a fantastic piece of news I hadn't seen before: someone's working getting RISC OS to run on the device.
You must be thrilled! I can't wait to see what you're going to do with that. 
Oh, and on the LCD with HDMI bit: you can find all sorts of cheap 640x480 lcd tvs that take a composite input, which are usually around 7 inches diagonal.
Hmm...what to put here....
willrandship wrote:
Oh, and on the LCD with HDMI bit: you can find all sorts of cheap 640x480 lcd tvs that take a composite input, which are usually around 7 inches diagonal.
Neat! One thing I've been wondering and haven't seen yet is if there's a small, cheap LCD, in the 320x240 to 640x480 range, which can connect to one of the onboard headers. 
Not sure where the Cortex A8 is in the whole arm generation list but I feel like the newly released BeagleBone would be a much better dev platform to build any sort of device off of since it has network IO and a boatload of other IO ports to use. Though it is also twice the cost, and I don't recall how much ram it has.
"Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer that knows where you live" -Unknown
"If you've done something right no one will know that you've done anything at all" -Futurama
"Have a nice day, or not, the choice is yours." Tom Steiner
<Michael_V> or create a Borg collective and call it The 83+
<Michael_V> Lower your slide cases and prepare to be silent linked. Memory clears are futile.
TheStorm wrote:
Not sure where the Cortex A8 is in the whole arm generation list but I feel like the newly released BeagleBone would be a much better dev platform to build any sort of device off of since it has network IO and a boatload of other IO ports to use. Though it is also twice the cost, and I don't recall how much ram it has.
As we were arguing on IRC, I think the much lower price of the Raspberry means that you could then build a much cheaper device with the Broadcom ARM11-based SoC if you wanted to move past dev boards to custom boards, and I'm not clear just how much performance you'd lose. Register to Join the Conversation
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