Re: Pi Forums

"I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation".

As a very rare contributer I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14 and the excellent after sales service.  Over the last 14 months I have purchased three Raspberry Pi. a self assembly Gertboard Kit, a PiFace Digital and most recently a BBB.  Every time Element 14 have done what they said they would do with very propmpt replies to any questions.  In particular Rachel has been very efficient and helpful.

Colin Gearon.

Colin Gearon wrote:

 

I also think the RasPi and it´s Foundation owes a lot to Element 14

Very true.  E14/Farnell hasn't really put a foot wrong throughout the whole Pi saga, not significantly.

Their site collapsed during launch for a few days, but that was caused by RPF's entirely ridiculous concept of opening the floodgates to pre-orders at a single instant of time and requiring customers to compete.  This is not just the power of hindsight.  Every web service on the planet with the exception of Google and Facebook is likely to collapse when 100k+ people hit it within a few seconds, and subsequent recovery is prevented because of the retries.  I blame the collapse squarely on RPF's faulty planning.  The fact that  RS collapsed at the same time offers proof of that.  At worst, Farnell and RS were guilty of not telling RPF that such an approach was not feasible given their server capabilities, although competition between them may have prevented either party saying "We can't do that".  It was obvious though.  Even RPF's forum sysadmin could have told them that.  It was even checkable in advance with a load test script.

Once Pi became available, my only significant criticisms of E14/Farnell are that the export site provides substandard Farnell service (compared to Farnell UK), and that they haven't been fast enough at putting Pi on a regular product footing now that it is ex-stock.  This still hasn't happened, and that's a fault because substandard service should never be considered "business as usual" for Farnell.  Also, they could have volunteered a bit more information when people were asking for it, but none of these things are epic disasters.

So on the whole, almost full marks.

And in case anyone suspects that this is just being nice to our hosts here, I think we've made our feelings quite plain and unambiguous when we've criticised the dreadful handling of knode discussions for BBB, so we don't hesitate to highlight things that are are broken when they are.  This problem is still present, but the fault was acknowledged rapidly and an update is in progress for end of Q3 so we live with it, unhappily but patiently.

Well done E14 on Pi.

I'm left wondering what the goal could be if it's not education though.

If you go by what they brag about,  it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many

boards as possible, and their #2 goal is to show off the features of VideoCore.

Their goals seem to be well aligned with their manufacturing partners in

preventing cloning of the board, and in selling accessories to hobbyists

and commercial uses.

selsinork wrote:

 

I'm left wondering what the goal could be if it's not education though.

There have been some funny suggestions offered over the last year to answer that question, bordering on sad as they may have contained a hint of truth.  At this stage though, I can't really say I care anymore.  The role for Pi in education may be fading, but many cheap instructional alternatives for budding electronics engineers exist today, and I don't just mean BBB.

Standalone Linux on ARM is certainly handy, but it's not essential for IT and engineering education.  A large proportion of young technical enthusiasts in the West have PCs, and so a microcontroller board offers a perfectly adequate platform on which to exercise important skills.  Many of these boards cost under 10 pounds, so the money barrier can be even lower than with Pi.  What's more, the pennies left over can be spent on a breadboard, cheap multimeter and some simple components, and you are likely to learn much more this way than by poking GPIOs from a Linux command line.

Small computer boards of all kinds have become a lot cheaper recently, and I think the Pi played an important role in driving price expectations down.  Whatever happens, we're ahead compared to a few years ago.

coder27 wrote:

 

it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many boards as possible,

doesn't make sense unless it's only about the money

their #2 goal is to show off the features of VideoCore.

means they're just broadcoms puppets. VideoCore is just another black box GPU wrapped in NDAs and patents. Plenty of those, nothing to see here.

preventing cloning of the board,

not sure who'd want to clone it today, why wouldn't I clone an A20 olinuxino or marsboard instead ?  Or a BBB (perhaps with a newer TI chip) ?

and in selling accessories to hobbyists and commercial uses.

so it's about the money ?

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I can't really say I care anymore. 

I care only in that it proved there was a market for cheap boards and that we now have others doing better boards in the same price range.

I like the idea of being able to build a cheap board like the Pi or BBB into something else and getting the benefits of not needing to do it all from scratch myself like I might with a microcontroller, while having some useful IO that PC's usually lack.  It's the halfway inbetween the two worlds that I think has potential, but it doesn't work at Sabre-Lite prices...

Don't forget:

"What we are lacking (and the Raspberry Pi Foundation cannot provide) is

getting a coherent set of materials we can use with it to teach Computational

Thinking and principled ideas from Computer Science."

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~am21/slides/CAS12.pdf   (page 22)

"But it meant we were faced with a dilemma. How could we enable hacking while preventing cloning?"

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/09/raspberry-pi-insider-exclusive-sellout-to-sell-out/

Raspbery Pi 2020:

   "8 cores, improved GPU, 8GB main memory"

  (with mention of ~$50 productivity PC, but no mention of improved educational materials)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rdm34/raspi-talk.pdf  (page 10)

selsinork wrote:

 

I like the idea of being able to build a cheap board like the Pi or BBB into something else and getting the benefits of not needing to do it all from scratch myself like I might with a microcontroller, while having some useful IO that PC's usually lack.

Indeed, but don't forget that there is yet another alternative which provides some of the flexibility of the Linux-on-embedded-ARM approach, not requiring an external PC for cross-development and yet achieved at a third of the cost of the Pi or BBB.

That's the old and now rather out-of-vogue approach of building a high-level language interpreter like eLua or Forth or even our old friend BASIC into a microcontroller board, with appropriate bindings for controlling GPIOs and other low-level resources.  You can fit a really impressive RTOS and language interpreter into the 192KB program flash of an STM32 Discovery board for example.  Depending on the board, you may still need a computer as an RS232 terminal or an LCD, but then even an embedded Linux board needs some kind of HCI.

selsinork wrote:

coder27 wrote:

 

it seems their #1 goal is to shift as many boards as possible,

doesn't make sense unless it's only about the money

There are other motivations besides money.  There's fame -- they seem to enjoy that a lot chez RasPi.  Look at Linus Torvalds -- he didn't get rich off Linux like Bill Gates, but he gets to to call the shots and has the priceless satisfaction of freeing the world from Microsoft dominance.

John Beetem wrote:

 

Look at Linus Torvalds -- he didn't get rich off Linux like Bill Gates, but he gets to to call the shots and has the priceless satisfaction of freeing the world from Microsoft dominance.

While that might work for Linus, in my view it has a slightly sinister overtone when it's the RPF chaining people to a black box GPU.

but yes, fame might be a viable substitute. simply shifting lots of boards doesn't guarantee fame though.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

but then even an embedded Linux board needs some kind of HCI.

I should have probably mentioned that bit's called ethernet

selsinork wrote:

 

I should have probably mentioned that bit's called ethernet

Real engineers use butterflies.  Only NSA spooks poke bits as they fly past on the wire.

selsinork wrote:

 

I should have probably mentioned that bit's called ethernet

Real engineers use butterflies.  Only NSA spooks poke bits as they fly past on the wire.