In a moment of nostalgic madness, I put my name down for this Raspberry Pi laptop, and it’s now about to be delivered.

Takes me back to the days of soldering in a huge 256kb of extra RAM into my computer in the early 80s.

Now I’ve got to think of a use for it. 🙂

BTW seeing as STW is actually the cycling computer nerds club, are any of you involved in this?

$299 + $30 shipping (and they’re a UK company) ! 😯

No but I know one of the founders, Pete Lomas, – who hand built the little first batch of Pi’s.
As I’ve got 5 of them doing various things around the place, we always have a good chat when we meet at parties.

Edit: It’s certainly a lot cheaper to just chuck a Pi onto your network and connect to it via ssh. Looks fun though.

Looks good for my six year old son..
My mate has his daughter on some rasberry/minecraft thing..

I”m not gonna pretend to understand but realise that I’m gonna havta catch up cos it’s the future for kids no?

Indeed – for less than that you can get a normal laptop with lots more power and several pis to connect hardware stuff to and control remotely. And still have change.

Which is pretty much what I have here with my £100 ebay laptop, currently with a putty terminal controlling my wifi connected RPi.

allthepies – Member
$299 + $30 shipping (and they’re a UK company) !

Ye gods, if I have to justify the price to you lot, I’m doomed when the missus finds out… 🙂

I figure I’ll probably get 2-300 hours fun out of it, so at $1/hr it won’t be too bad.

Or even cheaper per hour once I get my time nemeseses Minesweeper or Freecell on to it…

There’s only one nemesis 🙂

So what does the laptop do different to other laptops – I get the standard RP as a cheap, simple computer that you can connect to many other things but not so sure on this.

I’ve no idea. I don’t actually expect it to “do” anything, so whatever it does will be a bonus. It’s been bought for fun purposes.

I’ve dragged out my books on Python etc, but they’re probably hopelessly out of date.

If I can get “Hello, world” out of it, I’ll be satisfied.

And no matter what I do to it or how much I spend, it will never perform anywhere nearly as well as a cheap ChromeBook.

But any spiffing ideas welcomed.

On the other hand maybe I’ll link up N? Pis together and create a supercomputer that will melt the National Grid.

No, wait, my electric kettle already does that… 🙂

LOL. Does it have the ability to connect to stuff in the same way as a standard Pi then? Eg it’s just a boxed up pi with screen attached?

Sooo… Have I got the wrong end of the stick then? It’s not a learning aid for children?
I’m confused

serious question

nemesis – Member
LOL. Does it have the ability to connect to stuff in the same way as a standard Pi then? Eg it’s just a boxed up pi with screen attached?

Probably. I did say in a moment of madness…

I was thinking back to the days when we had to cobble our own computers and the “fun” that was.

And thinking more clearly now, that’s why I switched to Macintosh when the blazingly powerful SE/30 came out.

But you’re talking to someone who thought DOS 2.11 was a great advance on what went before.

I missed that – BBC B was my starting point but soldering wasn’t necessary…

BTW seeing as STW is actually the cycling computer nerds club, are any of you involved in this?

Not the pi top, but we host the Raspberry Pi website which has been interesting, particularly on their launch days. The pi top site was struggling when I tried a little earlier. Maybe we need to offer them some hosting 🙂

I’ve had the Pi-Top for a few weeks now. After the initial fun, it gets fiddled with about once every couple of days.

The keyboard and trackpad are a bit kludgy, so physically it’s like using a very down market laptop. It does however do everything it says on the box, so that’s a win. And it’s completely upgradeable, so that will probably happen.

However, I have a Pi Zero sitting in front of me (free with the Mag-Pi) and now I have to find a use for it.

In a moment of dementedness I suggested to my wife that a 20 high stack of them would make an ideal Xmas present, so no doubt I’ll be building a supercomputer (well actually a cluster) in the New Year, and still no idea what to do with it. I expect it will plumb the depths of my extremely rusty programming ignorance though… 🙂

I bought a pi² on the way to work so the lads can do a hackathon on the last day on Wednesday… A bit like toy day when you were at school. Hoping we can at least make an arcade emulator out of it or maybe something that involves slack integration s.. 🙂

Excellent! My final year uni project was on parallelisation – never managed to make it work properly, maybe I should have another stab at it.

Update:

Upgraded to the Pi3 board. Bargain at £35. The laptop is now usable – much faster.

It’s a 64 bit although it’s still running on 32. No doubt there will shortly be an OS upgrade to take advantage of this, so more speed can be expected for some applications (and at no cost).

Still waiting for my Xmas present from the wife so no mega computer yet.