RPi use cases explained

Here is my take on this odd situation.  There are several needs and types of stakeholders in the Pi ecosystem:

• Conceptual need in EE.  Eben Upton has many times related the problems he experienced while doing student recruitment  at university, where each year's intake candidates were seemingly  less technically experienced than the last.  I can well believe that, because we saw exactly that same problem in my own engineering department, to the point where we had to provide catch-up courses to bring part of the student intake up to the level where they could  understand basic 1st-year EE lectures.  Making very cheap hardware available that encourages experimentation by inquisitive youngsters does seem to address part of the problem squarely by fostering interest and offering direct experience with hardware.  However, it doesn't address the gap in mathematics and foundational science skills.

• Improving IT education.  The UK has a specific problem in school-level IT education, in that over time it became nothing more than vocational training in office skills.  Clearly there is much room for improvement there, but this is almost entirely unrelated to the skills shortage observed in EE recruitment.  CompSci departments might benefit a little if programming were taught in schools, but not a lot because lack of programming skills is not the bottleneck,  Stronger maths skills would be vastly more useful than programming knowledge, and would help EE as much as every other branch of engineering and the physical sciences.  Also, programming is almost always vocational training with just a smidgeon of CompSci education acquired by osmosis on the side, and very rapidly becomes dated.  To compound matters further, a high-level language with a lot of abstraction would tend to be chosen for programming education, which means that pupils would tend to learn little about computer fundamentals unless they have an awesome teacher who explains the foundations along with the programming.

• Cheap media centre.  Don't laugh, this is a major stakeholder group for Pi.  What's more, RPF have always known this, because they have promoted the very strong media capability of the Broadcom SoC countless times in their blog.  They even went as far as to sell licensed codecs which are about as distant from educational as anything could be.  This area may well be getting the most development effort as well, which is reasonable since it plays to the Pi's biggest strength and makes a very large group of Pi users happy.

• Platform for expansions.  It always did seem odd that the Foundation so often stressed the difficulty of reaching their $25/$35 price point, and yet created a board bearing proprietary MIPI DSI and CSI-2 connectors which raised the board cost and complicated PCB routing.  Even more odd is that these MIPI interfaces would not contribute significantly to the board's educational capabilities since USB cameras and displays with open interfaces were readily available at good prices.  The subsequent high investment by RPF in developing camera and display modules suggests that this was a planned business strategy from the start, and it explains why the extra connector cost was considered justified.  One possible view is that there is business advantage in creating a platform for which expansion modules could be produced using a proprietary interface spec that narrows the competition.  Whether or not that was the thinking, it is the current actuality since RPF has invested time and money in expansions and delivered product.

• Enthusiasts/makers hacking platform.  Quite distinct from the needs of EE and UK IT education, a  large group of stakeholders is the worldwide and ever-growing community of makers and related enthusiasts, which may or may not be technical.  This group is heavily interested in creative projects which typically underpin some other area of interest that isn't itself computing.  The Foundation has from the start shown some interest in supporting this group, as evidenced by the board's P1 interfacing header and the near-miraculous provision of SoC peripheral interfacing information from a SoC manufacturer that has shown very little interest in supplying open documentation.  The enthusiast/maker community is strongly aligned with the open source software and open hardware communities since closed/proprietary devices impede rather than support building things.  Unfortunately RPF has been lukewarm in this area as the board is not open hardware, the SoC has very little open documentation, and not all of the software is open source either.  Undoubtedly most of the blame for this lies with Broadcom, but RPF spokespersons have defended the restriction of information themselves as well.

• Commercial for-profit product.  This stakeholder group is small but obvious.  RPF is a registered non-profit, but Premier Farnell and RS are not, and so the Pi has to justify its place on warehouse shelves.  The typically high profits on accessories probably make this quite easy though.

It's pretty clear from the above that the Pi ecosystem has multiple interested parties and drivers, and proceeds along many roads simultaneously with varying degrees of support from the Foundation.

In other words, the Raspberry Pi's concept, rationale, targets and user base are not correlated.

Getting a single view from anyone (especially RPF) is no more productive than all those blind men feeling different parts of the elephant.  To say that it was designed for IT education is completely wrong if intended literally --- Pi would not have been designed as it was nor targetted so strongly at non-educational stakeholders if that had been the primary intention.  This makes the question of "Why is there still no educational release?" a simple one to answer:  IT education was only one driving force, and clearly not a major one.

The only certain position is from objective engineering:  it's an ARM board with specific pros and cons, and it's those pros and cons that determine its effectiveness or otherwise for any given application.  I guess that's more boring than hype-laden official positioning statements by people with vested interests, but in contrast to them, it's accurate.

Morgaine.

Morgaine I remember been phoned by Eben some 2 years ago about the RPi.

His aims at the time were as he stated to create a cheap device for education as well as a curriculum to support it.

In fact he was rather amazed at the wave of hackers who took to the device.

I think at least some of the problem is that the foundation was hoping that more of the curriculum would bubble up out of the comunity where  this would be a wave of enthusiastic teaching staff. The reality is that the comunity is in fact predominantly a hacker driven one who know little about what constitutes a curriculum and probably less interest.

I keep on about this curriculum but with out it's guidance most teachers volunteered with teaching this are going to be wofuly unprepared. Things seem to be improving but maybe not at the pace they originally expected.

Mind you the world rarely moves to the beat you expect.

As I noted above from personal experience, the shortfall in STEM skills was very pronounced when trying to recruit undergrads, so I can easily believe that this triggered the Raspberry Pi concept in Eben.  Not much about Pi is strongly correlated with that original idea though.  Pi is a medusa of stakeholders, and the heads aren't talking to each other.  There is no common goal, and  education is not a primary goal since it is not where most effort has been expended.

John Alexander wrote:

 

In fact he was rather amazed at the wave of hackers who took to the device.

That's rather naive of him.  Prodcuing something general enough to be used by anyone, for anything, then making it amazingly cheap was bound to have the effect it did.

the curriculum would bubble up out of the comunity where  this would be a wave of enthusiastic teaching staff.

You'd have to think that if the enthusiastic teaching staff existed, then they'd probably be doing something about it themselves.  Part of the problem in this field is that it moves fast enough that even the paid professionals can have trouble keeping track, and keeping up. Quite where that leaves the teachers is anyones guess.

John Alexander wrote:

 

In fact he was rather amazed at the wave of hackers who took to the device.

That's rather naive of him.  Prodcuing something general enough to be used by anyone, for anything, then making it amazingly cheap was bound to have the effect it did.

the curriculum would bubble up out of the comunity where  this would be a wave of enthusiastic teaching staff.

You'd have to think that if the enthusiastic teaching staff existed, then they'd probably be doing something about it themselves.  Part of the problem in this field is that it moves fast enough that even the paid professionals can have trouble keeping track, and keeping up. Quite where that leaves the teachers is anyones guess.

Selsinork, how are they dealing with the fact that the sensor is so much smaller than that for secuity cameras.

do you just need to put up with the  fact your sensor covers only a fraction of the expected area?

John Alexander wrote:

 

Selsinork, how are they dealing with the fact that the sensor is so much smaller than that for secuity cameras.

do you just need to put up with the  fact your sensor covers only a fraction of the expected area?

Two thoughts, the camera will stream 1920x1080, so the horizontal field of view is quite good, or you just add a fisheye style lens intended for a mobile phone to widen the angle.

The simple fact that it's around 50 quid for something that can do 5M pixel stills (or low fps mjpeg) or ~2Mp 30fps streaming compared to probably 200-300 for a 1.3Mp is going to make it worthwhile exploring. Example http://www.camsecure.co.uk/HDWebcam720P.html  of one that has a similarly capable camera, so with that sort of price difference you can be sure it's going to be done...

There are several recipies for getting it working with motion or zoneminder on the RPF forum.

I expect security cameras weren't something that was ever thought about, but there's a community out here who will think up all manner of uses

selsinork wrote:

 

I expect security cameras weren't something that was ever thought about, but there's a community out here who will think up all manner of uses

Oh I think it was planned from the start, as the glowing LAN9512 chip can keep the lens demisted.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Oh I think it was planned from the start, as the glowing LAN9512 chip can keep the lens demisted.

I wonder how good a source of infra-red illumination it would be

selsinork wrote:

 

I wonder how good a source of infra-red illumination it would be

Now that's proper lateral engineering thinking!

Sorry when you said standard lenses I was expecting C mount lenses like those on a propper security camera.

It would be interesting to see how the Pi Cam operates in low light !?!?!

selsinork wrote:

 

John Alexander wrote:

 

Selsinork, how are they dealing with the fact that the sensor is so much smaller than that for secuity cameras.

do you just need to put up with the  fact your sensor covers only a fraction of the expected area?

Two thoughts, the camera will stream 1920x1080, so the horizontal field of view is quite good, or you just add a fisheye style lens intended for a mobile phone to widen the angle.

 

The simple fact that it's around 50 quid for something that can do 5M pixel stills (or low fps mjpeg) or ~2Mp 30fps streaming compared to probably 200-300 for a 1.3Mp is going to make it worthwhile exploring. Example http://www.camsecure.co.uk/HDWebcam720P.html  of one that has a similarly capable camera, so with that sort of price difference you can be sure it's going to be done...

There are several recipies for getting it working with motion or zoneminder on the RPF forum.

I expect security cameras weren't something that was ever thought about, but there's a community out here who will think up all manner of uses

John Alexander wrote:

 

Sorry when you said standard lenses I was expecting C mount lenses like those on a propper security camera.

It would be interesting to see how the Pi Cam operates in low light !?!?!

I'm not sure it was C-Mount lenses, but as it's basically some sort of machined aluminium block made to align with the screw holes in the board, I don't see why someone couldn't come up with a C-Mount version of it.

This is one of the ones I saw http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=45887

As for low light, there are people prying apart the camera so that they can remove the IR filter...  I'm sure I've said it before, but these are cheap enough that everything is going to be tried..