What's Your Pi Plan??

I have at least sort of two different plans with the Raspberry Pi

1- Use it for research on low cost embedded Linux application development as a remote or central controller for other systems, Internet of Things kind of stuff

    Some of the stuff I'm working on I started to post it here http://www.element14.com/community/thread/18981?tstart=0

2- I was planning to put together sort of a development lab, contributing my time and funding to have a bunch of R-pis on a local High School, but I'm having second thougths about it given that I'm loosing confidence in the Raspberry Pi Foundation to be able to deliver, and some attitudes that have been developing over there, on top of some of the techincal issues related to the board. I'll probably put the money on something more reliable and with more features, it will probably be more expensive but at least it won't blow up TVs or force me to try a collection of power supplies, SD cards, keyboards, etc, etc, to make sure they work

I was really excited about the R-pi, I've other ARM based development boards such as Beagleboard, Beaglebone, Pandaboard, etc., but my level of exciment with the Pi declined considerably, I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

-J

I have at least sort of two different plans with the Raspberry Pi

1- Use it for research on low cost embedded Linux application development as a remote or central controller for other systems, Internet of Things kind of stuff

    Some of the stuff I'm working on I started to post it here http://www.element14.com/community/thread/18981?tstart=0

2- I was planning to put together sort of a development lab, contributing my time and funding to have a bunch of R-pis on a local High School, but I'm having second thougths about it given that I'm loosing confidence in the Raspberry Pi Foundation to be able to deliver, and some attitudes that have been developing over there, on top of some of the techincal issues related to the board. I'll probably put the money on something more reliable and with more features, it will probably be more expensive but at least it won't blow up TVs or force me to try a collection of power supplies, SD cards, keyboards, etc, etc, to make sure they work

I was really excited about the R-pi, I've other ARM based development boards such as Beagleboard, Beaglebone, Pandaboard, etc., but my level of exciment with the Pi declined considerably, I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

-J

why the decline of excitement? I have not kept up with the recent new of RPi so please share whatever made you loose faith in the RPi foundation

It's difficult to be excited when you have to wait what seems like an eternity for delivery. Still waiting, waiting......... There were 103 on ebay this morning (at excessive prices) so the supply situation is clearly flawed.

jamodio wrote:

 

I was really excited about the R-pi, I've other ARM based development boards such as Beagleboard, Beaglebone, Pandaboard, etc., but my level of exciment with the Pi declined considerably, I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

 

-J

The apc looked interesting, sensible size, mounting holes in the corners but the 720p & no general purpose i/o is a downer. 

Element 14 must have internal projections of by what date Pi boards can be expected to be available ex-stock.  I wish they'd let us know too.  Until then, it's pretty much impossible to plan ahead with Pi.

well yeah but one does not simply start disliking something because it takes a long time to get it... but I admit that they could have gone with a better approach with this, they should have made the board and gotten all testing done along with a deal with a good manufacturer and then announced it after that, so that the wait would be minimal...

Anton Björkqvist wrote:

 

well yeah but one does not simply start disliking something because it takes a long time to get it

That's not the reason why the Foundation is disliked, there's a long and ugly history behind it.  You'll have to read the other threads to see the reasons, it serves no purpose to repeat them yet again in this thread.

The board itself has its problems, but then all cheap devices do, it's nothing new.  Unfortunately it also gets tarnished by the Foundation's odd approach to life and the universe.  Can't be helped.

When somebody persistently and apparently consciously drives on the wrong side of the road, the probability of a nasty accident increases in several orders of magnitude, and it does not matter much that it is driving what is perceived and sold to the rest as the best car in class in the planet.

Then when you get a chance to have the same car, you learn that it does no start without special gas, some of the features don't function as expected, the engine overheats, you have to sit on it in a specific position (after on our own you obtain appropiate seats that fit because it does not come with them), etc, etc, you complain to the factory and try to reason with them, and you end being the one that is a bad driver trying to harm the flawless reputation of the organization.

Still is a cool and cheap car to have in the garage for some mods and experimentation.

-J

jamodio wrote:

 

I'm now waiting for shipment of the http://apc.io/.

It's worth noting that the WonderMedia WM8750 SoC in the APC has on-chip Ethernet MAC, like the BeagleBone.  For a network appliance, that can be expected to provide substantially better performance than the off-chip Ethernet over USB as in the Pi and most other cheap Linux boards.

I'm looking forward to the APC.  It has the same lowly ARM1176 core as in the Pi rather than a Cortex-A8 like the BeagleBone, but it leads the way with 512MB RAM at an interesting price point.

Morgaine.

When I got into the microprocessor world I learned to program with six seven segment displays, so 720p for programing in Phyton does not sound that bad.

I really have no clue how good/bad this board is going to turn, information still sketchy, pictures and overall design looks good, it has VGA much better than composite video if you don't want to go HDMI, form factor is sort of standard in the PC world, and comes!! with a power supply.

I placed my preorder last month, they are expected to start shipping during July.

It Android runs decently well, it could become an interesting platform for development and experimentation with Android applications, and I've no doubt that sooner or later some folks (including me) will cut an Linux kernel image, well after all in Android the kernel is Linux :-)

-J

jamodio wrote:

 

When I got into the microprocessor world I learned to program with six seven segment displays, so 720p for programing in Phyton does not sound that bad.

The WonderMedia WM8750 does 1080p, so not really sure why APC has limited it to 720p -- http://www.wondermedia.com.tw/en/products/platform/soc/wm8750/index.jsp

It might just need a small hack to get it working at full SoC spec.