Details About Raspberry Pi Foundation's $25 PC

First time accepted submitter salcan writes "There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We've seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November this year. Eben Upton, director of the foundation, recently gave a talk at Bletchley Park regarding Educating Programmers, which focused on the thinking behind the $25 PC."

The new Arduino

[AC-x]

$25 is less than the cost of most Arduino boards, if it's possible to add some digital/analogue inputs/outputs it could become electronics bloggers new favourite toy (at least for high power mains projects, I suspect Arduino will still have much better power consumption!)

Problem

[should_be_linear]

If 128MB version costs $25, why they didn't go with 2GB for $30 instead? $5 difference for almost "classic" web PC with mainstream OS (Ubuntu).

Re:Problem

[White Flame]

They're making a 256MB version with additional ports for $35. I doubt they could put 2GB of RAM on there; most of these ARM SoCs are intended to use stacked chips, and I don't think they've gone beyond 256MB in the stacked form factor.

Even if the chip does allow using a non-stacked configuration, that's still extra board real estate & wiring which increases the complexity of the build, and $5 isn't going to get you 2GB of memory anyway.

Want.

[neokushan]

I want one of these and I can easily afford (and own) PC's worth 4-figures.

I don't know why, I just want one.

Documentation, Documentation, Documentation.

[benbean]

Looks like a great project. I think a key though will be to have some well-written documentation or tutorials to go with it. For my first computer (Atari 800XL), my Dad just bought a book on BASIC and a book of type-in games, and it was going through those that encouraged me to learn and experiment. Hopefully they can get a hookup with O'Reilly or somebody to produce a companion volume.

Reeeally pie in the sky wish would be for a BBC series to go with it, a la The Computer Programme, Making the Most of your Micro and Micro Live. Never gonna happen sadly. :-(