[HH] Federico's talk, part 2

[Drew Van Zandt]

Come to the Asylum and look at the Rascal, then.

There's a $100 board that needs only a 5V supply and runs Debian, $84 in
quantity.  TS-7500 from embeddedarm.com.  I have likely mentioned it before.

*
Drew Van Zandt
Artisan's Asylum Craft Lead, Electronics & Robotics
Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
*



On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
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