I'm still having problems with the hype.
I'm heavily involved at the "cutting edge" of IT (have been for nearly 30 years) and do so like my toys. For many years, I've been using Atmel ATmegas (occasionally PICs and others) and sometimes Arduinos (based on Atmel chips) to do really good stuff very very cheaply as personal projects. Much more cheaply than a Pi.
Yes, Arduinos don't have on-board HDMI, twin USB ports, a 100baseT Ethernet port etc. in the base board, but they are a damn sight simpler to use and are also programmed with the same tools. The stuff that the Pi has as standard is often unused in a SBC environment and is available very cheaply indeed for those uP environments that by default don't have those features. i.e. you only need the hardware that's appropriate for your application.
There may be 1.2million Pis out there, but there must be 10s or even 100s of million Arduinos/Atmel bits out there (also PICs and others) - eBay is full of really cheap add-ons - 100s of different things you can do, or just do your own thing...
Anyway, I have two Pis - both model Bs - one on my desk at work where we were thinking about loading our entire Linux-based product codebase onto it just for fun to see if it worked, and one at home which is now feeling a tad unloved...
I hope that the Pi helps people get interested in programming, but it equally could deter as its über geeky and not at all friendly to beginners..
Before anyone gets protective and goes on about how new and wonderful all this is, lets not forget that Unix is a 1970s kernel and Linux is simply a variant of the base idea, C was developed in 1972 and is largely unchanged, C & C++ are horrendously dangerous languages for beginners, the GNU toolchain originates way back but was only really stable from about 1998. I was a late-comer and only wrote my first C compiler in 1982.
So what is actually new? Certainly not the software - the development environment, languages, o/s and architecture are, by any current measure, extremely dated - why are we looking to train people on such ancient architectures?
The hardware *is* new (thanks to Broadcom). Its very small and cute, but there are loads of other boards out there which in many people's opinion are a whole bunch simpler to use, and which are also small & cute (and often cheaper).
I don't want to rain on their parade at all - very noble intentions and all that - but when looked at hard, IMHO it's a bit of an "Emperor's New Clothes" ...
I'm heavily involved at the "cutting edge" of IT (have been for nearly 30 years) and do so like my toys. For many years, I've been using Atmel ATmegas (occasionally PICs and others) and sometimes Arduinos (based on Atmel chips) to do really good stuff very very cheaply as personal projects. Much more cheaply than a Pi.
Yes, Arduinos don't have on-board HDMI, twin USB ports, a 100baseT Ethernet port etc. in the base board, but they are a damn sight simpler to use and are also programmed with the same tools. The stuff that the Pi has as standard is often unused in a SBC environment and is available very cheaply indeed for those uP environments that by default don't have those features. i.e. you only need the hardware that's appropriate for your application.
There may be 1.2million Pis out there, but there must be 10s or even 100s of million Arduinos/Atmel bits out there (also PICs and others) - eBay is full of really cheap add-ons - 100s of different things you can do, or just do your own thing...
Anyway, I have two Pis - both model Bs - one on my desk at work where we were thinking about loading our entire Linux-based product codebase onto it just for fun to see if it worked, and one at home which is now feeling a tad unloved...
I hope that the Pi helps people get interested in programming, but it equally could deter as its über geeky and not at all friendly to beginners..
Before anyone gets protective and goes on about how new and wonderful all this is, lets not forget that Unix is a 1970s kernel and Linux is simply a variant of the base idea, C was developed in 1972 and is largely unchanged, C & C++ are horrendously dangerous languages for beginners, the GNU toolchain originates way back but was only really stable from about 1998. I was a late-comer and only wrote my first C compiler in 1982.
So what is actually new? Certainly not the software - the development environment, languages, o/s and architecture are, by any current measure, extremely dated - why are we looking to train people on such ancient architectures?
The hardware *is* new (thanks to Broadcom). Its very small and cute, but there are loads of other boards out there which in many people's opinion are a whole bunch simpler to use, and which are also small & cute (and often cheaper).
I don't want to rain on their parade at all - very noble intentions and all that - but when looked at hard, IMHO it's a bit of an "Emperor's New Clothes" ...
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