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. 

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

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