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.

John Beetem wrote:

 

As I understand it, RasPi was inspired by Eben's disappointment with the amount of programming knowledge shown by candidates for jobs [...] nowadays compared to the 1980s.

I'm always perplexed about that side of things given the high value that seems to be placed on scratch & python.  From what I see in the outside world, Java, C++, C#, PHP would likely be better long-term choices even if much more difficult to start with.

From what we know of Eben, he's not old enough to know what skills job candidates in the 80's had anyway. 

The 80's were very different from today, the instant gratification thing we see today didn't exist, and the kids were gaining their programming knowledge by teaching themselves assembly language programming on whaterer home computer they had access to. Instead of googling for a bit of code they didn't understand to cut&paste they were learning things the hard way.

I don't necessarily think we should go back to the 80's, but I don't believe the conditions that inspired that generation exist anymore, or that you can instill the interest in the upcoming generations with a GCSE course or a cheap bit of hardware.

So I'm not surprised by the lack of programming knowledge seen today, I see it as part of the continual change and evolution in computing. When you start reducing 'programming' to drag&drop, and I could be talking about scratch or VisualStudio here, you can't expect the skills to remain the same as they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. Things change.

Frank Lane wrote:

 

but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

Frank, can we help ?  

There's a good bunch of people here with some diverse experience and we're generally happy to discuss stuff.   As long as you're not too bothered about us wandering off topic a bit now and then

Frank,

The forums might be of value to those who already know something about modern systems and software, but I have wasted hours trying to find solutions to quite basic problems. (" .. fire-hose ... pointing the wrong way.")

At times I feel like giving up altogether, but I was asked to help write a course for Year 8 and Year 9 pupils based on the R-Pi, so I'll persevere.

Can you tell us more about what you plan to teach in this course?

For example, are you trying to teach programming?  Or are you trying

to teach electronics?   Are you trying to make the course specific to

the RPi, or general enough to teach on other platforms as well?

I have made some suggestions here:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/23494?start=2&tstart=0

which you might find helpful if you're teaching programming.

I seem to recall that coder27 has pointed out on many occasions that the stated goals of providing a supported educational release never materialized.

I would go farther than that.  Not only has the educational release not materialized,

after a considerable length of time, but it doesn't seem to be the primary focus of the RPF.  

If you look at where they put their effort, they are putting a lot of effort into features that

appeal more to hobbyists than education, such as the camera module.  And they are

putting a lot of effort into visual effects such as window transition fading, of interest for

non-educational use cases such as advanced multimedia playback, complex digital

signage, or set-top boxes, as noted here:

http://www.element14.com/community/message/81876#81876/l/rpi-use-cases-explained

If computer science education based on low-cost, credit-card sized, linux-based ARM

computers were their primary goal, then they could save a lot of effort trying to fix what

appear to be nearly impossible-to-fix USB and other hardware/firmware/kernel issues,

and focus on bringing their planned linux-based educational materials to market on BBB

and similar platforms expected to come in the near future that RPF may not have the

resources to compete with while developing educational materials at the same time.

coder27 wrote:

 

I would go farther than that.  Not only has the educational release not materialized,

after a considerable length of time, but it doesn't seem to be the primary focus of the RPF.  

and yet thet still bang on about it.  I think the recently unveiled GCSE syllabus video stuff may well end up being the 'educational release'.

Here in the UK there's probably 5-6 weeks left before the next school year starts. If it's not ready and in the hands of the schools today, I expect it's missed another year. It's not impossible they could get all this into schools in that short a time, but you'd like to think the schools planned ahead. If they did, then the decisions for the next year could already have been made and the budget could be assigned to other things.

I came to the conclusion long ago that education wasn't the goal, their words say one thing, but as you've observed their actions don't appear to agree. 

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

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)

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)