[HH] Federico's talk, part 2

[Tom Metro]

Tom Metro wrote:
> Next up was Federico. He started with a demo of "little bits," which are
> modular circuit blocks that you can assemble sort of like LEGOs.

As someone pointed out, this is almost the same ideas as:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking@blu.org/msg00094.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DwzskCmTgE

or there was another one that was an even closer match that had fully
enclosed modules that connected together with magnets. I thought I
posted about it to this list, but I can't find it and don't recall the
name. (Twine, a ruggedized sensor developed by some MIT Media Lab kids
is related, but not what I'm thinking of.)


> He next showed off a Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), showed
> a close up board view using a USB microscope, and then demoed booting it
> to Debian and started up X with the xfce desktop.
> 
> Lastly he demonstrated a CuBox computer (http://www.solid-run.com/),
> which is impressively packaged as a 2" cube. 

FYI, Newark (US arm of Farnell/element14) has an RPi page:
http://www.newark.com/jsp/displayProduct.jsp?sku=83T1943&CMP=KNC-G-SUPP-RASPBERRYPI&mckv=sZwE3zPRh|pcrid|10193933301|plid|

(They're actually paying for a Google Ad that links there.)

but it shows zero in stock (and quotes a lead time of 141 days). They
have a bunch of accessories, including a red plastic case.


While I was interested in the RPi demo, I'm still not sure what I'd use
one for, as it seemed to be underpowered as a media playback device.

The Gertboard (thanks Kurt) might change that:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/gertboard

(I'm surprised to see they are already on rev 2 of this board, even
though the RPi was only just released. But I guess he had easy access to
RPi prototypes.)

If they could get a $35 board running Linux that also had a
good ecosystem of peripherals (be it Arduino shield or something else),
then it would be a useful platform.

However the Gertboard isn't just a motherboard for peripheral boards,
but an all-in-one peripheral board, so it likely won't be cheap. (I
didn't see any mention of pricing.) It will at least double, if not
triple or more the cost of creating an RPi project.

The RPi, as Federico pointed out, does have a GPIO connector, so you can
always hack together your own I/O.


The Cubox sounded better suited for media playback, but once you get
past the cool packaging, it sounds like there will be more powerful
(better CPUs) alternatives in the same price range.


I'm still curious to learn more about the Rascal (the locally developed
ARM board that runs Linux and has Arduino shield compatible connectors),
which I mentioned on the HH list last week. I asked Federico about it
after the talk, and he said he hadn't heard of it. (And said he was
behind on reading HH email.)

To me, this board makes the most sense once you've decided to scale up
from an Arduino to a device running Linux. The big down side is the $100
~ $150 price. If they can get the price down further with volume, it
might be more convenient than hacking stuff onto an RPi.

 -Tom