21-07-2012, 02:18 PM
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Pi in the sky
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Dave Akerman has his own blog, where there's a lot more info about the equipment he uses, getting permission for the flights, and such thorny topics as risks and insurance (low risks - good job - no insurance available!) Well worth a squint: http://www.daveakerman.com/
Very uplifting (‘scuse the pun, in the context of high altitude balloons!) that he’s British, and that the Raspberry Pi was invented by the Raspberry pi Foundation - a British charitable organisation registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. The board of trustees was assembled by 2008 and the Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded as a registered charity in May 2009 in Caldecote, Cambridgeshire. The Foundation is supported by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Broadcom. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom). The Foundation's aim is to "promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing". Certainly seems to be doing that!
Regards, David.
BVWS Member. G-QRP Club Member 1339. 'I'm in my own little world, but I'm happy, and they know me here' 
21-07-2012, 06:26 PM
Somebody has to say this and it might as well be me as the Bulls**t has now reached the stage of the Kings New Clothes.
The Raspberry PI is a bog standard SBC which have been about for twenty years to my knowledge. It isn't particularly cheap. In fact when you add on what you need to get it going and put an enclosure round it the quoted price is little short of a con. So far at least the software support is almost non-existent, to the point where the only people who are trying to use it are already 'skilled in the arts' It's no more of a 'British Invention' than the average Mobile Phone. The idea that a whole generation of teenagers will be galvanised into plunging into writing code and understanding computers beggars belief. The facilities have always been there, but as usual the take-up is pathetic. It all takes me back to days of Sugar and Sinclair - Bulls**t baffles brains, but the Marketing is second to none. Humbug. Alan
21-07-2012, 07:54 PM
Oh dear Al - I didn't want to make it sound like the second coming or an 'Archimedes moment' and it's not in the same league as was the invention of the flying shuttle or spinning jenny were in their day. I do agree that a lot of hype has surrounded the Rasperry pi, but I find it uplifting when an amateur on a shoestring budget, using a bit of enterprise and ingenuity, achieves results which rival that of that many agencies with big budgets.
"Beagle 2" comes to mind - the unsuccessful British spacecraft that formed part of the European Space Agency's 2003 'Mars Express' mission. Yes, I know it failed, but Beagle 2 was conceived not by NASA with a multi-billion dollar budget - just a group of British academics and scientists on a tight budget, headed by Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University, in collaboration with the University of Leicester. Its purpose was to search for signs of life on Mars, but all contact with it was lost upon its separation from the Mars Express six days before its scheduled entry into the atmosphere. At least they tried. As to Sinclair and Sugar - I wouldn't dignify Alan Sugar by sparing him a moment of my time. I think Sinclair did more to establish home computers than did Sugar and his ill-fated Amstrad offerings, and Sir Clive also paved the way for pocket calculators. His little TVs were quite innovative too - made by Timex under licence till they fizzled out. Uncle Clive well and truly lost the plot with the C5 - an electric car powered by a Hoover motor? I don't think so! It wasn't marketing bull-feathers which was Sinclair's downfall - quite the reverse - it was a lack of marketing expertise in not understanding the market for personal transport. An electric car which looked like a child's pedal car, with a top speed of 15MPH, (fasted speed permitted without a driving licence), afforded no protection from the elements for the driver, was low down so posed a danger, had a short range (later addressed by a second battery), brought to market in 1985, 20 years after bubble cars had fizzled out. What was that all about? Using Sterling Moss - a formula 1 racing driver - was another example of lack of marketing expertise and inevitably held Sinclair and the C5 up to ridicule. Although it was a commercial disaster and sold only around 17,000 units, as Sir Clive is not slow to point out, it was "the best selling electric vehicle" in the UK until November 2011 - 25 years later - when the Nissan Leaf had sold over 20,000 units.
Regards, David.
BVWS Member. G-QRP Club Member 1339. 'I'm in my own little world, but I'm happy, and they know me here'
21-07-2012, 08:19 PM
we made a lot of money buying shop return amstrad stuff mainly tvr3's.we ended up with about 20 on rental i dont know where they were built but quality controle was unknown,a lot had components never fitted from new!shame because they were well designed and easy to service.i cant forgive the large screen amstads
1/2 a roll of solder had to be used on each one that came in for repair. As for sinclair geneus or madman i am not shore rob t
if its made by hand it can be repaired by hand
21-07-2012, 08:58 PM
David,
I think the problem is, and has been for many a long year in some quarters, that the hype overtakes the reality, and that leads to a lot of disappointment when it doesn't work out. I'll put that into context. My younger son was born in 1979 so he was the right age for the ZX80, Spectrum etc and the BBC, which by the way I thought was a ludicrous price and used the wrong Processor. And yes, apart from the overblown adverts - it wasn't until you saw one that you realised how small they really were - the Sinclair products really were better. When he was about 12 I cobbled together a PC for him out of an tiny SBC, a Floppy drive and a Mono Screen. He also had an Acorn and later, when a friend of ours went to work for Acorn, she got him a one of the prototype ARCs - now that was splendid. When he was at Secondary School I used to have to go round at 6 and drag him out before the Cleaners locked him in - they had an excellent range of Acorn gear. Now for the tricky question. Out of all the teenagers who were at that school at the time how many would you guess made any sense of it all? The answer is none. OK, Rob had an advantage, me, and actually several other people - friends. But in practical terms he was the only one that I knew who had the knack, ability and perseverance to make a go of it. The rest? They're on the Checkouts. I'll take bets that the RP will never make any lasting impression and the vast majority will finish up gathering dust. RS already have a built-in Returns Procedure for dissatisfied Customers. I'm all in favour of encouraging children to pursue such things if they have the knack and enthusiasm. But in the usual manner of the Educational Establishment, largely staffed by Left Wing Arts Graduates, once something is deemed a 'Good Thing' then everyone must get onto the bandwagon. Thus we have 6 year old learning Mandarin when they can't add 2 and 2 or teenagers trying the read Shakespeare when the can't read English. Like I said, Humbug. Alan
Interesting thread, don't know much about the PI but I suppose I could Google it to find out, as a guess I would say it's for the enthusiasts and thus a limited market, as has been pointed out the technology isn't exactley earth shattering although the idea of reviving basic interests in basic computing technology is interesting in itself.
As to Sugar and Sinclair well they are two different animals, Sugar was a born salesman you have to give him that, to come from the bottom up is what many aspire to,'nowt wrong with that either, Sugar did not know one end of a PC from another, he didn't need to, he knows his base price and he knows his selling price, he knows his market and he knows what margin he can operate within the rest is down to ruthless efficiency. I agree with what Alan has said to the greater extent. Bill Gates did not invent the computer but he did in effect invent/discover the mass "applications" market that is why he bacame one of the richest men on the planet. The computer as such is all a bit of a hype all they do is add subtract etc binary forms, yes we need them but only to run application software and that is where the real money is: Microsoft, Ebay, Facebook, most online forums, Paypal etc the list goes on and it's all down to the Yanks so there yer go. It will be interesting in years to come to see if the powers that be have any contingency plans in the event of a total PC/Communications meltdown, it's not happened yet but in all probability it will, our daily lives have been irrevocably changed by modern technology since the seventies, all this technology depends mainly enirely on the constant availabilty of relatively uninteruppted electrical power supply....I hope the power workers are happy with their pay.... As to left wing artyfarty teachers you can draw your own conclusions, most of the old rightwing teachers of my day were basically pedeafiles, sadists and masochists!!! This talk of British inventions/discoveries reminds me of Lodge and Marconi and we all know how that ended up, lesson to be learnt I think. Lawrence.
21-07-2012, 11:17 PM
(21-07-2012, 06:26 PM)AlanBeckett Wrote: Somebody has to say this and it might as well be me as the Bulls**t has now reached the stage of the Kings New Clothes. This is astonishing. I don't think I could agree with this any less! Where to start? Well, the idea of an SBC isn't new, but this performance at the price point certainly is. It costs only slightly more than an Arduino Uno, which has a fraction of the processing power and doesn't have any of the connectivity that the Pi has. You can add an ethernet "shield" to an Arduino, at around the cost of a Pi, and you'd still need to find a way to connect a monitor to it. Can you play back 1080 video on an Arduino, or any other SBC at this price point? Regarding OS support, it's important to realise that the Pi is in the pre-release development phase - the OS is a work in progress ahead of the full launch. Things have leapt forward with the release of Raspbian, which is finally written to take advantage of the hardware in the Broadcom CPU/GPU. There are a fair few disappointed people complaining in the forums, but these are those who ordered theirs at 6AM on the pre-launch day on the strength of hearing a news report - if they'd taken the time to read up, they'd have not bought jumped in. As far as they were concerned, this was a cheap desktop replacement - they'd missed the point totally. OK, you might say that this was a problem with the marketing being too successful, but normally we fail miserably with the marketing - it's just sour grapes to resent the Pi team for realising that they needed to market effectively if this was to get anywhere. Naturally, "technology correspondents" have to simplify things for a news report - that's not the fault of the Pi Foundation. The Foundation, BTW, is totally non-profit. And British. The problem with programming at school was not the available machines - it was the teaching and the curriculum. Being able to produce a Powerpoint was considered essential, being able to programme was not. What the Pi has done has added fuel to the argument that programming should be brought back into IT classes, and has provided a cost-effective means of doing so. The fact these can easily be connected to simple hardware only helps here - they have the equivalent of the BBC Micro's User Port, which we had hours of fun with back at school. The applications for these outside of this are almost infinite. Given that practically everything uses an embedded processor of some sort, the ability to build a reasonably sophisticated bit of gear with that sort of processing power at that price is pretty staggering. For example, I want to build an audio test set that can do FFT analysis without a PC, and this will fit the bill perfectly. Obviously, people are already using them as media centres and network servers (very low power consumption being a clear benefit). Given that one day RISCOS will be an available OS option, I'll be able to programme in BBC BASIC - practically in my sleep. Yes, I can do this on my PC, but who wants the overhead of Windows in an embedded system? Humbug indeed. Cheer up - no-one is forcing you to buy one 
22-07-2012, 07:59 AM
I'm with Alan.
The Pi may be cheap but when the cost of the other bits you need to do anything with it are added on the total is going to be more than a secondhand conventional system which will just work without needing a lot of messing about. I dare say it will have specialist uses but the idea of a "Computer" for thirty quid is the veriest b/s. As for Amstard, all I can say is that my 1989 vintage PC1512 was still going until I retried it two years ago. - Joe
11-08-2012, 11:12 PM
I know this is an old thread, but just looking through my computer and I found a reply that I knocked out a couple of weeks back, just before the forum problems. For what it's worth, here it is:
But Joe, why do you think it's meant to be a desktop PC replacement? It's not; it never has been. The Foundation say in their FAQ that performance is roughly comparable with a mid-range P2, but with faster graphics. Would you try to use a even a top of the range P2 as an everyday desktop PC running Windows 7 or the latest release of Ubuntu? The fact it will run a web browser and open up a spreadsheet is really just meant to impress - and so it should, given the hardware and power consumption! The primary aim of the Foundation is to provide a very cheap hardware package and OS that can support a number of programming languages in an educational setting - the fact the hacking community is coming up with myriad uses for them is just adding to the excitement (and helping to speed up development and awareness). I also don't understand the point about cost. Sure, you need a micro-USB power supply and a memory card - that's around a tenner, but most people already have these. Everyone will already have a USB keyboard and mouse; indeed most school IT departments have mountains of these (as most lease companies don't want them returned when the PC goes back for H&S reasons). HDMI-compatible monitors have been around for a decade now. What else - a case? The case is clearly optional, but really nice ones are less than a tenner - most people like me will mount it inside the project it's being embedded in. Oh, and a second-hand PC will need the OS rebuilding before you can use it safely. There's a few hours of messing about right there - especially if you don't have the restore discs (or partition) and the PC uses unusual hardware (most do) that requires non-standard drivers. And once you've done all that, all you have is a large, noisy desktop PC that you couldn't send up into the sky on a balloon! Remember - think "embedded" - outside of the educational context, that's what the Pi is really about. Sorry to drone on, but so many people have completely missed the point. Partly because of sloppy journalism, perhaps? As a postscript, I finally got around to trying mine earlier today. I borrowed an SD card from my camera, downloaded "Raspbian", and used a piece of free software to put the OS onto to the card. To my amazement, it worked perfectly first time - from what I'd heard previously I was expecting a number of battles, but things are clearly a lot better with this release of the OS. I think total time was around 10 minutes, including the time taken to download the OS image. Never installed Windows that quickly! It ran better than I expected. Not blindingly fast, but better than my 1GHz P3 server machine (currently running a clean install of Lubuntu). Obviously the SD card is faster to access than a hard drive. Web-surfing was quite viable for sites that aren't too Javascript-heavy. The educational software looks like fine, and seems to run well. I spent a happy hour teaching the kids to play Connect 4. For a beta-release, it's looking pretty good. Cheers, Mark |
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