Raspberry Pi in the Post-Ordering Era

Hi Morgaine.

I expect that the interest will peak and trough at various levels over the coming months like a sinosoidal mad wave thing.  Some people will be disappointed with their new "toy" many will be deep into expanding what the Pi is currently capable of. If this seems to be a deluge of traffic just wait until some serious numbers of cased educational Pi's get into schools and then the kids start to come online with all their plans, ideas and requests for help.

Its going to be a "fruit-full" time and things can only get better. Better software more integrated with the hardware and the growth of communities (like this one) around the Pi.

Looking forward to the whole mad thing (and busy with my Arduinos too)

Ray

New community motto:     "UNITED THROUGH ORDERING". 

Oh I'm sure you're right, Ray.  Every time that there is a new PR push in the media, there will be another peak.

The biggie will happen when Pi goes into education though.  That's the important one.

But it's still funny as hell to observe that currently this is "the Pi ordering community".

I've also noticed a distinctive drop-off in interesting traffic especially on the RasPi forum.  Of course we long ago beat to death the topics of "what's the best educational programming language?" and "what's the best first language?" and "what's the best language?"  It's been so hard for people to get RasPis into their hot little hands that now that 10Ks of people have them it's rather anticlimactic.  It's pretty exciting to get that program going that blinks the LED in spite of all those layers of GNU/Linux (I know it was exciting for me on BeagleBoard) because so many things have to work right in order to do so.  However, once you've done the LED you've got to do something that requires real work and a lot of time.  Porting project XYZ over to RasPi is one thing, but creating something new and interesting takes a lot of time and documentation (some of which is not available) and reliable and complete software infrastructure (still a work in progress).

Then we have the real problem of the difficulties of getting this cheap computer for the masses up and running given the vagaries of USB "power supplies", USB micro cables, uncertainties of polyfuse behaviour, and uncertainties of manufacturing quality.  It would have been really nice if RasPi had chosen to keep manufacturing in the UK and raised the price on the "developer version" to reduce that uncertainty.  Chinese manufacturing can be very high quality, but from what I read that seems to take a huge amount of effort and volume.  If the RasPi manufacturing problems are more than a few start-up anomalies and RasPi is not able to get their arms around the problem, the project could have rough sailing ahead.

Also, any time I hear of people trying to get the education community to adopt something on a large scale I think of the Chinese saying: "If you're thinking one year ahead, sow a seed.  If you're thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.  If you're thinking 100 years ahead, educate the people."  Education is not generally a fast turn-around activity.  What I see as the best opportunity for RasPi is individual geek/nerds getting their hands on them because they capture the imagination (provided that it's not extinguished by heat-related unreliability) and doing fun things under the radar.  You won't ever hear of most of these projects, but the self-trained minds will help UK and other countries meet their geek/nerd needs, which is after all the purpose of RasPi.

So we'll see.  I should have my RasPi in a couple weeks and I'll see how fast I can port my software to it.  Sure, the software already runs on PCs and BeagleBoards, but I think it's a good fit for RasPi and because my software is stingy with resources it could have an advantage there.

The thing I like best about RasPi and the rest of the Attack of the Tiny GNU/Linux Computers is that one hardly hears anything about Microsoft any more.  In a world where large technology companies are trying to make consumption devices, it's nice that somebody's trying to make creation devices.

while ( 1 ) {

John Beetem wrote:

 

In a world where large technology companies are trying to make consumption devices, it's nice that somebody's trying to make creation devices.

}

Although of course the Foundation is but one of many players there, to my great happiness, so kudos also to Arduino, Adafruit, Sparkfun, Maker Faire, RepRap, and many hundreds of other small outfits that support the community of creative enthusiasts ... not forgetting the industrial powerhouses like Farnell and RS who find merit in supporting the low-volume needs of the enthusiast community as well.

Consumerism has gone mad and seems to be driving politics as well, but not everybody has that blindfold firmly in place.  Fortunately a few people do realize that this technological society cannot grow on foundations of magic.  Let's hope that it becomes more widely acknowledged.

Morgaine.

I think this is a difficult one. I have argued on the Pi forum that this device (pi) may not be the best bet for everyone and that a £25 second user machine (eg: HP DC7100, 3 gig processor,1 gig Ram, 80 GB hard drive) would be a better bet for some people / families. Put Ubuntu / Mint / Puppy on and you have a computer you can learn Python / C / whatever , and with the superior power available could also be used as another 'main' machine for the rest of the family, for browsing, e-mail etc.

The attraction for me of the Pi was to use it as a control / interface device rather like an Arduino, but as I'm far from being an expert in these matters, I can only get started by standing on the shoulders of others. I have spent a lot of time recently playing with an Arduino and have managed to construct my own project (modest though it is) and program it in the way that I wanted to rather than copy pasta other's code. That was only possible because of the huge support base for the Arduino. I now have the confidence to go on and do other things, but this has taken a while.

For me, one of the problems is that on the Pi forums there seems to be a distinct split of users, those totally new and really unaware of what they have bought into, and those a lot more skilled. who are extremely technical but don't communicate at a level the first type of people can follow. I have seen a number of times where the answer to a question has been, 'Oh yes, just do x, then y then z and you'll be fine' - with no links to how to do this and no further explanation, it is expected that the person will know the Linux command line, or how to compile code when this is clearly not the case. To my mind, this is what the Arduino community excels at, bridging that gap and being able to throw a good strong rope ladder down to those trying to climb the greasy pole of knowledge.

I expect that this groundswell will come eventually, when there are clear beginners guides and how-to's, but until then I think that it will stay as a preserve of the makers and creators that are making things now with other devices.

My other concern is that if I was a school about to commit some of my hard to come by budget on a large number of these devices and then seeing that there are a number of question marks over the reliability of the device in terms of chargers, heat and cards, I may well think again and go for something else that I can point my students towards.

It is good though that at the moment I am hearing very little about Microsoft and a lot about the RasPi and other similar devices, perhaps this is the turning point in something a lot bigger and perhaps only in hindsight will we know.

Steve

Morgaine,

   I think it is a mistake to think that the end of the "Pi Ordering Era"

will usher in the Era of Exploitation.  Instead, it looks like there

will be an Era of Debugging interposed, which may last much longer

than anyone had anticipated. 

I am not seeing much eagerness to take ownership of bugs and

get them resolved, as everyone expected.

See for example thexman's USB packet loss bug that he keeps

pinging without any response:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=5249

Similarly, everyone expected that the obvious bugs in Fedora14

would be promptly fixed, but no apparent progress in going on 3 months.

@Steve: I agree with everything you wrote there.  Note however that a mass movement can only rarely arise out of recycling old gear because the supply of the old items is patchy and the total population of users of any given old item is at a dead end.  In contrast, there are no barriers to a mass movement arising when a $35 device is in current production, and at that price it will be bought even by those for whom it is totally inappropriate.

That's why the Pi is making an impact, when far more appropriate and more capable equipment is not.

@coder27: Oh dear.

It certainly would be unfortunate if some kind of fundamental problem were found in the USB hardware, but I suspect that it won't be fundamental.  Lots of hardware has glitches, possibly all complex hardware, and drivers quite often have to compensate for issues or bypass them.

I don't have any sympathy for secrecy in this project though, given its educational goals.  The Foundation seems to be very reticent to accept anything from the community except pats on the back.  The polyfuse issue is still outstanding, and it's not going to be forgotten.  The longer RPF engineers wait before responding to serious problem reports, the less well it reflects on everyone concerned.

An ACK ("Noted, in the queue for checking") doesn't cost a lot.  Really, you'd think ACKs were made of gold, the way they're holding onto them.

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

An ACK ("Noted, in the queue for checking") doesn't cost a lot.  Really, you'd think ACKs were made of gold, the way they're holding onto them.

Hey, even a NAK is better than "server timeout".

"server timout" was colorfully described by Chris Tyler of Seneca:

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2012-05-16/fedora-meeting-1.2012-05-16-20.00.log.txt

20:58:13 [bconoboy] topic 5: What's the deal with raspberry pi f17?

20:59:25 [ctyler] bconoboy: We're close to a beta. Need to beat the Debian frankenimage on a couple of performance issues :-)

20:59:56 [ctyler] I'm hoping to get the kernel/firmware combo nailed down tomorrow.

21:00:43 [dgilmore] ctyler: how goes the getting support upstream?

21:01:42 [ctyler] dgilmore: communication is still swamped out, it's like a CPU that's trashing. I got word from Eben on one issue out of 5 I asked him about :-S