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

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

 

--- snipped ---

-J

When I wrote my first test program it was for a multiprocessor 16 bit industrial mini programmed in octal and displayed on rows of filament lamps. Used to be able to read the octals but wasn't sorry to move to hex! Paper tape input and output. No end to this theme..........

I will hopefully be using my Pi for a media server  from NAS but also on the side I would like to interface with an existing Arduino weather station. Never got that connected past an LCD display but it will be great to see the data up on the big screen. So some XRF radio to interface to hence the need for external I/O.

Nice !!!

I know what type of system you mean, I worked with one that was donated to our school that have that type of display, it was actually a "a direct register" machine, the instruction set was spread on a keyboard, and in fact numeric values were entered in octal.

The printer was a teletype attached to the monster, RAM was actually magnetic cores, and storage was fortunatelly not perforated tape but magnetic tape.

After a while, the thing became our best source of TTL integrated circuits for other experiments.

I think is possible but I really don't see the Pi as a good media server, but for the weather station and connecting with Arduino that will probably work great, think about trying to use ZigBee, some modules include both the RF transceiver and a little MCU, or an RF-MCU combo that runs the ZigBee protocol and you can use different ways to talk to it, via UART, I2C or SPI.

That sounds like an interesting project with the Pi.

-J

It's a gathering of old-timers here.  You too probably remember reading code by holding up paper tape to the light.

The Pi founders talk about the BBC Micro like it were the dawn of computing, but really they were 2nd or 3rd generation, just users of consumer gadgets with all the rough edges smoothed off for public consumption.  The hardcore technical work came before that.

Programming in Python won't really tell youngsters much about their machinery, although hopefully it will get them interested in technology in general, so it could be a stepping stone away from consumerism and towards better understanding.  I hope so.

Morgaine.

Picture of part of a core plane from a scrapped display system that I kept. Few bits there!

Haha, nice.  I guess I'm a newbie compared to that, but I did possess a 64 KB hard drive (yes, Kilo) ex PDP-7, and I still have a pile of those old DECtape cases which I use for component storage.  Oh and I preserved a 2MB RK07 removeable disk pack for posterity, just because it was reputed to be the base model for Hans Solo's Millennium Falcon.

From a slightly more modern vintage, one of my main racks here is from a PDP-11/34.  I'm so sad that I didn't grab the old PDP-11/20's binary toggle switches when the machine was thrown away, on which I'd entered the bootstrap code from memory so many hundreds or thousands of times.  I'm not really much into memorabilia that isn't functional, but the switch panel could have been interfaced nicely to an ARM Cortex to make a pretty unique UI for binary-aware techies.

Morgaine.

Ohhh my, this is g33k p0rn :-)

-J

When I moved from New Jersey (where I had a basement) to Texas, I had to leave behind a lot of equipment. I worked for several years with the company that ran one of the original NSFNet regional networks, JVNCNet that was build around the Princeton University and the John Von Neumann supercomputer center, after the center closed we inhireted a lot of stuff.

Some PDP-11 19" racks ended in my basement to mount part of the equipment I used for R&D in large scale networking and other stuff, in front of the racks shown in the picture I had a running PDP-11 and a Microvax, can't find where I put a picture of that one.

-J

@jamodio: Yup, same rack system, except that mine has an ornamental head section and I still have the slot-in side covers on mine which you've removed there.  Awesomely strong hardware, built to last forever unlike some modern racks.

I was so sad when DEC were purchased by Compaq, a mere PC company.  I knew it was the beginning of the end for their professional quality hardware.