Raspberry Pi

I heard about this project on the radio and thought it seemed brilliant. A low cost computer that encourages kids to mess about with it and learn about programming and code http://www.raspberrypi.org/ .
I’d love to get one for my kids and spend some time seeing what we could do with it BUT I know nowt about programming apart from some basic PLC stuff from back in the day and most of the stuff being bandied about on the site and their forum means nothing to me.
I think that for around £25 for the unit then I’d chance my arm (if they don’t sell out) and have a go but I’m a little wary, for want of a better word.
Anybody else know owt about it?

If it’s anything like arduino there will be books available and it will be great! lots of free (creative commons) stuff to help out there.

Anybody else know owt about it?

Yup, we do.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/raspberry-pi-any-thoughts

Ah, thanks Cougar. Note to self – do a search in future.

(-:

Not posting that to be an arse, just that there may be some useful posts there for you.

I heard about this project on the radio…

Was that Radio4 last week? Got me interested too.

MrSparkle,

As tumnurkoz says you can expect there to be good support both on-line from the “community” and in the form of books soon enough.

It will run Linux, but don’t be scared about that if you have never used it – everything you are likely to need will be straightforward. Whilst no doubt raspberry-pi will end up supporting various languages, it is being targetted at Python – which is an incredibly easy to learn language but extremely powerful.

Running XBMC now (no, I didn’t know what that was either, but it’s good apparently.)
XBMC

Been tinkering with a emulation of it in QEMU set for an Arm1176 CPU with 256mb of RAM and an Debian ARM distro with LXDE and it runs OK, so no doubt on the proper hardware with what is supposed to be quite a good GPU built into the main chip it should be quite impressive.

Tempting to knock up a cheap airplay adapter, amongst other things. Good carputer potential too..

Looks like we should be able to place our orders in a couple of weeks- whose going to be buying the mark 1 version?

A low cost computer that encourages kids to mess about with it and learn about programming and code

I hope this is true, but I fear that virtually the entire 1st batch will be snapped up by Linuxy geeks, not schools, kids, etc. and it will be an instant sell-out too.

I think the geek market is the target of the first batch- the educational version is to come later.

Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these!

From what I’ve read, the first batch is for the Linux geeks more technically minded so that they can iron out the kinks and kick start the creation of resources for us not so technical sorts. Think of them as beta testers.

It has a lot of promise, looking forward to how it develops over the next few years.

Tempted to get one of these, just for XBMC!

Carputer is exactly what I was thinking – used to have a mini-itx + lilliput screen years ago in my fiesta…