Topic: Raspberry Pi

For anyone with an interest in game development or just programming in general, there is a new computer about to be launched that has been designed to make it as cheap and easy as possible for people to give it a try. The computer is called the Raspberry Pi and it will cost £16-£22 ($25-$35) depending on the model.

It was concieved as being similar to the old 8-bit home computers, in that you just plug in the power and it's on instantly with a wealth of resources available to get people programming in an environment where they aren't afraid to experiment as they can't really break the machine quite as easily as you can with a Windows system. Since the final design runs linux, it's not really quite what was originally anticipated, you still have to boot into a fairly substantial OS and you can also boot into a windows like environment, but there is an absolute wealth of free software available to download for the thing before it has even been launched.

The cost is also a little deceptive. For your money, all you get is the bare board. You have to provide the power supply for yourself (micro USB phone charger will do, it'll even run off AA batteries, but again you'd have to get the bits to connect them yourself), HDMI cable, keyboard & mouse (best to get a wireless set that share a receiver as there are only 2 USB ports at best!), network cable or wireless USB stick and an SD card (it uses them as a hard drive). Having said that, I reckon my setup will cost me less than £50 in total although I could really just use existing SD cards and keyboard/mice that I have kicking round to drop that price right down.

The project is aimed firmly at education, but they completely welcome people buying for personal use. The group behind it (it includes one of the creators of the 8 bit classic Elite, David Braben) is a registered charity taking no profit from the business. Their goal is simple - to get more young 'uns programming again and learning more about how computers work rather than how to use certain software packages.

If anyone is interested, the main site is here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
The companies that will be manufacturing and selling the boards are http://uk.rs-online.com/ (UK) and http://www.element14.com/community/index.jspa (worldwide).

Also, there are some pretty good tutorials on setting up the operating system on the device (you get a choice of what operating systems you might want to install) and starting programming games in Python, a powerful scripting language. The tutorials actually show you how to set up the whole environment on a PC running an emulator of the Pi (sort of emulator for anyone who wants to get technical). Tutorials are here: http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-43015/l/raspberry... - more can be found on YouTube from the same guy.

This sort of programming is pretty much exactly what got me started in programming and now I have a game of my own published as DSiWare and a career in the games dev industry.

does it have internet access? if it does, it'll be perfect for me! I want to have a technology career in the future, but know next to nothing about how to make a game. If this would help me, i'll buy it (and the internet would let me get off my 3ds web browser)
And i saw the digger dan video on the eShop, looks cool!

Yes, assuming you either buy the Model B one and plug in an ethernet cable or get either model and plug in a WiFi USB stick (not sure how easy it is to get those setup, though), but you can download a free Windows style desktop environment, free internet browsers and free email clients.

Downloading software on the thing is stupidly easy. You run some client that litsts what's available for your hardware, tick a box to say what you want and click install. It downloads it all and installs it. As simple as that. Watch the tutorials, brilliant stuff.

I ordered one of these earlier for my son. He's way too young at the moment but figured we can build a neat case and learn some stuff together when he's older. I wouldn't mind learning some stuff myself but never had the patience beyond some basic VB.

I could see how this would be useful. Probably won't buy the hardware, but I might add Rasberry Pi to my VMWare library. I'll have to watch the rest of the videos before I make a decision.

Also, what CPU and GPU settings did he choose?

I've been reading about this for some time. I think its a great idea and I honestly didn't think we would ever see something like this being made in this day and age.Hopefully this will show kids what you can do with a computer other than write crap on facebook. So pleased to see that its sold out and they are making another batch.Who knows, it may spark the same level of bedroom programmers that we saw in the eighties. I'd love to see a resurgence of the British indie scene of that era.
I used to love writing little programs and games on my commodore64 when I was a young un. Good times.

They're making GameMaker for Raspberry Pi, too! I'm totally stoked!

The co-founder said in an interview that they may be implementing an app store with it too.. But I think that is quite a way off.

http://www.youngwebbuilder.com/interview-with-eben-upton-co-f...

And thus, entirely missing the point of the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is designed to get kids learning how to code in real code, learning transferable skills in a fun way.

I was looking at the Raspberry Pi site literally 10 minutes before finding this thread. I'm really interested in getting one in the near future

Oh yeah my Raspberry Pi thing arrived a couple days ago. I should probably open it up and check it out sometime. I still need to purchase a case of course... And a USB mouse if I plan on using the GUI... And well lots of other stuff really. But in due time I will have this thing figured out o_o

I can't get past the name.

So, is this thread still active?

I have been using Raspberry Pi to surf the web ever since YouTube decided to autoplay their videos and drain my bandwidth. With Midori, that's not happening. I'm turning mine into a desktop, complete with USB harddrive and all. The problem is, the cheapest hard drive is 500 MB, and I'm not sure I'll use it all. Already got it, and I'm wondering whether or not to partition the hard drive and how.

I've also bought extras to experiment with embedded hardware. Just bought my first soldering kit. Imagine that. Me, a dedicated software guy, buying a soldering kit. I guess I'm into hardware now. Blame it on Raspberry Pi.

Wow, this thing sounds amassing. But kinda useless for me and my 1,700 Dolller custom CPU but still awsome all the same.

Great,ANOTHER thread bumped after a year... >.<

Lol, people are just lookin for the old ones to see if any are interesting.

(Be awsome if my intro to Touhou got attention just sayin.)

I was going to make a new one, but I fail to see how that is better. Petit Computer 3DS thread will be bumped so many years into the future, too.

BTW, Raspberry Pi is cool stuff now. It won many awards as enabler device. It's the future of technological education. Even Google came up with Coder, specifically designed to run on Raspberry Pi. If you don't like it, that's fine, but to post just to complain about an old thread being revived is rude and not at all productive.

According to Moore's Law, that $1700 will be worth $850 in two years, a loss of $850. While mine will lose at most $35.
That's why I only buy old, obsolete computer. They will not go obsolete. They already did! Then again, I don't play any of the new computer games on PC, so YMMV.

According to Moore's Law, that $1700 will be worth $850 in two years, a loss of $850. While mine will lose at most $35.
That's why I only buy old, obsolete computer. They will not go obsolete. They already did! Then again, I don't play any of the new computer games on PC, so YMMV.

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It's a custom and it can be upgraded Farly easy for cheaper the price thankfully, like if I want a new hard drive all I need is to buy it septet and just plug it into my CPU.

Never under-estimate the power, appeal, and re-use of old tech. SD technology is very old, extremely old, back in the late 80s they had already written it off as useless compared to disc hard drives .... pretty useless there, the SD technology turned out to be, huh? A lot of technology today is based on theories and experiments done by ... wait for it ... Tesla, not Edison. All of Edison based technology is now known to be inferior when compared to Tesla based technology, and Tesla was considered insane, and therefore obsolete, his entire life. Turns out, he wasn't crazy but so far ahead of his time that if they'd listened to him back then, we'd probably be mining Mars today. To the CPU thing, what makes technology superior is not the speed, power, or how much it does, but how well and how long it will do it. Many military systems still utilize the 8086 family of processors because of that one reason, they work and continue to do what they do well, even if it's not 5 gigabytes of data processing in a few seconds. I would invest in a bomb shelter if your "custom" CPU was to ever be used in place of a nuclear missile's CPU.

Though I'm wondering, based on your last post, do you even know that the CPU is a single chip in your computer? You plug it into the computer's motherboard, you don't plug anything into it.

The beauty of customization is that the system is designed just for you. Just as DawnOverALilly's system is designed for her, my Raspberry Pi system is custom made just for me. The difference is that Raspberry Pi Customization uses USB port, and perhaps GPIO. Her system is done via peripheral slots. Motherboard expansion allows a much better bandwidth rate than USB 2.0 port.

The thing is, looking at computer progress over the years, I wonder how long would customized system lasts. I know USB 2.0 is being phased out in favor of 3.0. Yet, looking at custom PC industry, we have SOC instead of traditional CPU. That requires motherboard swap. Better, faster memory also requires motherboard swap. By buying old computers, I practically did motherboard swap everytime I upgrade.

And that's the thing. I don't play PC games anymore. I hardly have time for my Nintendo games. So that leaves my PC work for office productivity, and hey, I'm used to doing it with 486-66 system, so doing it with Raspberry Pi is no loss for me.
Except for Calibre and Webcam work, it never hits 100% anyway.

PS: I added you KittenKoder!

Cave Story game has been ported to Raspberry Pi. And apparently, there's a good Atari emulator on the Pi, as well.