[HH] Raspberry Pi stuff: enclosure, Pi NAS, closed source not good for education

[Tom Metro]

Thanks to Stephen Adler for filming and posting his Raspberry Pi
Video/Tutorial:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking@blu.org/msg00487.html

(I haven't viewed it, but will take a look when/if I get a Raspberry Pi.)


Here's a fairly introductory Raspberry Pi tutorial that end with how to
use a Raspberry Pi as a NAS:
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/raspberry-pi-tutorial-how-to-do-more-1095946


adafruit is promoting a colorful new Pi enclosure that is made of a
rainbow assortment of laser cut acrylic that stacks up and is sandwiched
between a top and bottom layer of clear acrylic:
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/20/in-stock-pibow-enclosure-for-raspberry-pi-computers/


Why One Person Thinks Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable For Education
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/2056240/why-one-person-thinks-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-for-education?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

(Quoting Slashdot, which quotes the original article,
http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-for-education/)

  "Raspberry Pi was designed for education. As any popular product is
  bound to, Raspberry Pi has been criticized a lot for things like lack
  of a box, absence of supplied charger or even WiFi. Raspberry Pi has a
  much more fundamental flaw, which directly conflicts with its original
  goal: it is a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by
  corporations. It isn't even remotely an open platform."

The "proprietary GPU blob needed to boot" is mentioned, which has
been discussed here before. The article also touches on the ARM being
patented, which I don't have a problem with. But it also says that
documentation on the ARM architecture is not freely available, and that
indeed could be a problem.

It goes on to list some completely open source CPU cores, as well as
pointing out other proprietary vendors, like Atmel, have freely shared
their documentation without onerous licensing restrictions.

The author recommends the more open Beagle Board or Samsung ODROID-X as
a Raspberry Pi alternative. He also recommends the fully open hardware
Milkymist One, but it costs $800 and thus isn't a practical alternative.
I guess he wasn't aware of some of the other open hardware boards that
are in the same league as the Pi and still fairly cheap.

Rhombus Tech (http://rhombus-tech.net/), a company creating an open
hardware platform, was mentioned in the Slashdot comments. (Not terribly
unique. I posted about another Raspberry Pi-class device recently
(OLinuXino-Micro) that was open.) The Rhombus Tech products will use a
PCMCIA-like metal-enclosed card design, and their first model will use
an Allwinner A10 CPU.

The full article is worth a read.

The Slashdot blurb also references:

Raspberry Pi's Secret: 'Sell Out a Little to Sell a Lot'
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/09/raspberry-pi-insider-exclusive-sellout-to-sell-out

  ...if other manufacturers copied the design, our partners would lose
  their investment, which was approaching several million dollars.

  How could we enable hacking while preventing cloning? Holding back the
  schematics altogether troubled us. Not being open would impede
  people's ability to interface and hack the hardware - defeating the
  very goals we had set out to accomplish with Raspberry Pi in the first
  place.

  So we decided to publish the schematics, but hold back the detailed
  Bill of Materials (BOM) and physical PCB design or "Gerbers" for a
  limited amount of time. After all, hardware is just one part of our
  overall plans. The schematics alone don't provide enough information
  to clone the Pi without expending considerable effort re-laying the
  PCB and figuring out the exact part used in each location.

Ummm...if Broadcom is one of the partners, and the product depends on
the Broadcom SoC that in turn requires a proprietary software blob, it
would seem they already had two hard to bypass barriers to cloning:
Broadcom could refuse to sell the SoC, or it could shut down the clones
for copyright violation. Was Broadcom not cooperative?

Here's an interesting bit on the board fabrication:

  ...we had 253 connections to bring out (the BGA escape) in an area
  much smaller than the size of a dime. And while there are special
  high-density interconnect (HDI) techniques for densely layered PCBs,
  those would just reduce yield and increase processing steps not to
  mention the costs. ... What if we could steal the idea of "blind micro
  vias" from high-density interconnects, but apply it cheaply enough for
  the Pi design?

  Instead of going through all the PCB layers, we made human-hair sized
  holes (micro vias) that go through only the first couple of layers
  (blind) - saving just enough space on the other layers for wiring up
  the other PCB components. At high volumes, these holes could be made
  quickly and efficiently with a laser. And it only cost a few cents
  extra. Making these tradeoffs resulted in a relatively simple
  six-layer board that didn't compromise power distribution. And it
  enabled manufacturing at scale.

Seems like another good way to ward off clones, unless this technique is
widely known.

 -Tom