Pi in the sky

[Radio Fixer]

Sounds a useful improvement. Wish I had the time to get involved with it and an application.

Gary

[camallison]

Alan,

Why are you always so sceptical, negative and dismissive? I am so glad we are different generations, and I never had an engineer like you in any of my companies.

The Raspberry Pi was developed in people's spare time, much like the Arduino. They chose to move "profits" into a charitable organisation to further education in this field, a £1m of which is going into nothing to do with Raspberry Pi. The original design, albeit with slight minor updates, has now reached over 3 million units sold and is continuing to climb. They have also now produced two more variants - that's called "EVOLUTION" and listening to the market, Alan, and NOT hype.

This is to be my last post and visit here as I don't see any further value to my visiting, even though I have donated cash towards the running of the forum and also donated a scanner to Joe to assist his task as keeper of the archive material or whatever it is called.

Goodbye.

Colin

[pwdrive]

Please reconsider, it's a shame for anyone to quit the forum over differences of opinion.

Lawrence.

[AlanBeckett]

Please reconsider, it's a shame for anyone to quit the forum over differences of opinion.

Indeed. It is, however, a current fact of life that any view that doesn't align with 'Received Wisdom' is simply dismissed out of hand as Lunatic, Racist, Bigotted, Homophobic etc, etc. No attempt is made to provide reasoned arguments to refute the alternative view, and here I'm not talking about theories that the Earth is really flat or that life began with the arrivel of 'Little Green Men' in Flying Saucers. The current 'High Profile' example is Global Warming, conveniently re-labelled 'Climate Change' when it clearly wasn't happening. And on that particular subject a dodgy Computer Model isn't 'Evidence'.

Yes, I could be regarded as a cynical pessimist, but then I spent 40 and more years designing Product which had to last a bit longer than the time taken to get it back from the Shop, get bored with it and chuck it in the cupboard under the stairs.

SBCs can appear to be an attractive proposition, and many Designers, me included, have been sucked in by their perceived advantages.

The sequence of events goes something like this:-

1. You're issued with a Requirement Spec for a new Product. Do it any way you like just make sure you meet all the Requirements, and by the way you've got 6 Months.

2. Read and digest the Spec, scratch head, suck pencil etc.There appears to be two reasonable approaches - Design it from scratch, which would be pretty tight, or find an SBC with the right facilities, Interfaces, Support etc.

3. S&M are happy with the proposed SBC approach and the Price & Timescale loooks good.

4. Choose a suitable one - there's plenty available - and order a couple, plus Support Software and Hardware.

5. Cobble a rough Prototype together and write some Software.

6. Everything looking good so get on with designing/buying Enclosure, Hardware, PSU, etc, etc.

7. Assemble a Real One' and test it. Everything is looking exceptionally Hunky-Dory.

8. Contact the Manufacturer and/or Agent to get best Price/Delivery for the Production quantity. Ah, that one. We've upgraded it. However, it's got a better Processor and more Interfaces. It's only slightly bigger and only uses a bit more Power but it should be OK, and there's still time to get it going before the Deadline.

9.Order a couple of 'new' Samples and repeat 5 - 7, but quicker 'cause you've already done it once. Of course the Mounting holes are in a different place and the Plugs & Sockets are different, but that's easy to cope with, isn't it? The new Compiler looks like a Beta Version with a few Bugs, but there's work-arounds and an improved Version is promised shortly.

10. It's working again, and there's only been slight slip in the Project, mainly down to working 16 hour Days and Weekends.

10. Contact the Manufacturer and/or Agent to get best Price/Delivery for the Production quantity. Ah, that one. It hasn't worked out as well as we'd hoped so we've decided to re-design it, but fear not, the new one will be better.

11. Go back to 2 or 4, whichever floats your Boat, and tell S&M that the project has just crashed. It is, of course, clearly your fault for choosing the wrong methodology.

OK, that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, and it isn't usually that bad, but it can and does happen. There are times when a leap in the gloom if not the dark is required to get things done.

I've spent many hours getting young tadgers to work through the pros and cons of a particular approach as opposed to jumping on the latest Bandwagon and having to do the job 3 times before getting it to work. In a nutshell I hate 'biff-bang-wallop' designing.

To get back to the RP and my last Comment I quote from the BBC Report:-

'The new model is released as the Pi faces increasing competition from other tiny computers.'

That exactly matches my original comments at the beginning of this Thread. It ain't unique, there's plenty of alternatives and I simply don't believe that it will sweep the World and generate a mass of youngsters who will becomeTechnologists.

Alan

[Mark Hennessy]

I'm closing this thread for now, pending discussions in the back room.

Apologies to all those who might want to contribute constructively to this discussion - there is every chance it will be re-opened in the future.

Thank you,

Mark