Pi in the sky

[Mark Hennessy]

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

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