London Calling: Sony set to make Raspberry Pi

9/10/2012 11:06 AM EDT

RasPi is a terrific GNU/Linux platform for the price, with a strong developer community. However, GNU/Linux is in many ways a mainframe operating system and programming down at the bare metal can be challenging, especially since the BCM2835 documentation is limited.

For bare-metal real-time development, here are a couple of interesting new boards to be available later this month:

Texas Instruments Stellaris® LM4F120 LaunchPad Evaluation Board (http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-lm4f120xl) with a promotional price of US$4.99. The processor is an 80 MHz Cortex-M4F with DSP instructions, FLOATING POINT, 256KB Flash, and 32KB SRAM.

Freescale Freedoom Kinetis KL25Z development board (http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/dev_platforms_kits/element14_dev_kits/kinetis_kl2_freedom_board) for US$12.95 with 48 MHz Cortex-M0+, 128KB Flash, and 16KB SRAM.

9/10/2012 2:55 PM EDT

Why spending time in something that you cannot purchase to put in your product ?
This is vaporware.
Try Linux Stamp ( http://www.thelinuxstamp.com/ )
Use Atmel, you can purchase the chips right in the corner;
Datasheets ? Get full datasheets at atmel.com.

9/11/2012 3:53 AM EDT

I am not sure why you think such things are vaporware as they have been on sale for some time.

In fact that highlights a reason to purchase Raspberry Pi or Mbed; lower price.

9/11/2012 12:26 PM EDT

Surely if you want to got smaller embedded, there is Arduino.

The key thing about Raspberry Pi is its accessibility for students. The easy ability to control arbitrary hardware - my son wants to use it to control his radio controlled car, my daughter for wearable electronics.

But the key difference to mbed is the open source ecosystem. mbed is great, and well supported, but you use it within ARM's development environment. For education you need to be able to explore and that is what the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem gives you.

9/12/2012 5:47 AM EDT

@Jeremy

Good points.

But I am not sure limiting the information available (datasheet as secret document) is in the same spirit as open exploration.

As you may be able to tell the disappearance of freely available datasheets from the engineering environment is a pet peeve of mine. Broadcom is not alone in this.

9/12/2012 8:41 AM EDT

Of course the Raspberry Pi 2 follow on does not have to use the same Broadcom SoC, or even a Broadcom chip at all. Although it might ;)

But unfortunately, as we have gone from standard components towards single supplier SoCs it is an increasing trend for the chip companies to restrict access to datasheets.

The dictum being: "You must tell me everything about your business, before I will choose whether or not to tell you anything about this component.........And if I don't believe you are not going to buy a lot of chips, i won't."

9/12/2012 8:56 AM EDT

As interesting as these RaspberryPi looks on the surface when I put on my marketing hat and really think about what I can or would want to do with it, I am frankly somewhat at a loss. I know the flames will be starting but really.

1) To me the out of the box I/O for embedded is limited. Anything that can accept an HDMI output is by nature expensive in comparison throwing the $25 out the window. That to some degree goes for Ethernet as well. The comparison is made to Arduino and I don't think it is as valid as Arduino is focused on interfacing to the real world.

2) It needs an SD card image. Yes they can be bought which is good, but if you ever need to create your own, you need a PC.

3) Speaking of PC, likely any first world or 2nd world development and programming that is ever going to occur for one of these is going to happen on a PC. Wasn't the point of the board to encourage programming ... well you are on a PC and you can write a myriad of programs for that with about as much user interface capability as the RaspberryPi.

4) There cheap dev boards from a number of hardware vendors in a similar price range that are not flying off the shelf. Yes I realize there is not the infrastructure ...but still. The processor choice/broadcom issue could make it difficult to translate the hardware into a custom design.


Will these be sold .... sure. Hundreds of thousands? I could see them selling a lot, but that could be a lofty goal.


Will they be used or collect dust (outside a university/college environment) ... quite possibly.

One needs to add an SD card, keyboard, power supply, display to create a computer. Otherwise you already have a computer and you are defeating the purpose of the board. To that end, it is not $25.

With sub $100 PC projects, with wifi (LAN is not good without a connection), I question the direction of the project at this point.

9/13/2012 12:21 PM EDT

Have a look for A10 A11 boards that you can buy for 40$ now - they are better than Raspbery as have more powerful chipset, more memory and better graphics. Ports of Linux and Androids are there available.