----- Original Message ----- From: Paul B <red [ dot ] line [ at ] rogers [ dot ] com> Date: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 8:32 pm Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] RISCy Raspberry and the ARM Revolution: Part Deux > ... > Yet the ARM Revolution continues. > > Due out next month is the Raspberry Pi (see www.raspberrypi.org ). > It's a 700MHz ARM RISC SoC with an hdmi out serviced by a broadcom > gpu (m'eh, I take it they're inexpensive, but not "open" or free > as in freedom). It's all very ordinary until you get to the power > consumed (<1W) and the price: $25 for the bare bones base model; > $35 for twice the ram, and 100baseT Ethernet on board. > > And it's looking like Debian is going to be the out-of-the-box > distro (hooray, my kinda distro). > ... > Thoughts? Any other Raspi fans out there in OCLUG land? > I took the time to look up the previous "ARM Revolution" thread. For your conveniene: http://oclug.on.ca/archives/linux/2011-February/002915.html Stephen had been working with a Guruplug, and the Dreamplug was just on the horizon. The dream plug retails for ~$150US, and looks to be quite capable (have a look at the HW block diagram). It's a pretty cool looking platform. The great thing with the Raspi is going to be the cost. $25-$35US for the board. That's as low a barrier to entry as I can think of. Sure, you still have to add an SD card, and you'll likely want to add a flash drive. There will be some incidental expenses (get your HDMI cable from a dollar store because you won't find a better price on the things), but the core and GPU is there, for really low cost. Sure, the Raspi has it limits (like the USB 2.0 controller also servicing the ethernet PHY; looks like this will almost always be the bottleneck for "day dreaming" type applications), but at what cost? Less than the cost of a case of domestic beer? Cool. Really, really cool. Something else that's neat about this thing: http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#BootRom How unusual is this?