Why One Person Thinks Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable For Education 133
An anonymous reader writes "Raspberry Pi was designed for education. As any popular product is bound to, Raspberry Pi has been criticized a lot for things like lack of a box, absence of supplied charger or even WiFi. Raspberry Pi has a much more fundamental flaw, which directly conflicts with its original goal: it is a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations. It isn't even remotely an open platform."
The author thinks that patents on ARM are a serious threat to the openness of the platform (among other things like the proprietary GPU blob needed to boot). But even the FSF doesn't go that far. Wired had an editorial with the foundation justifying "selling out a little to sell a lot" that has a lot of info on the choices they had to make to hit their cost target.
Ford cars bad choice for teaching auto tech... (Score:5, Interesting)
They're closed source, built in factories that don't allow public tours. The CAD drawings for parts aren't even available to registered Ford mechanics, never mind the consumer or student. Most auto tech classes only teach installation and repair of OEM parts.
There's no way a student can learn adequately about the repair and maintenance of cars while working on Ford products. This is unacceptable.
Repurposed Allwinner tablets (Score:5, Interesting)
I started working on an embedded project (hobby, not work) that needed something beefier than an Arduino. Took my time looking at what's out there: various ARM dev boards, the Raspi (with its proprietary Broadcom chip) and one or two other "embeddable" platforms.
Last week, I was working out how to interface to a display (and the grinding that would entail). The same day, Slashdot ran the "hardware is dead" article [slashdot.org]. So, I took a chance and ordered a generic 7" tablet. They aren't kidding - these things are under $60 shipped. That's like 2 days' parking in downtown SF.
It uses the Allwinner A13 SoC (ARM core, integrated 10/100 ethernet, GPL'd kernel sources). Runs Android 4 out of the box, but Debian will also run. I can just hang an Arduino off the USB bus for my custom I/O, and code up a touch-based interface. Shoot, looks like it'll be easier to develop for than the Raspi.
I'm all for hackery for hackery's sake, but now that it's "the future," I'm glad we don't have to lift ourselves up by the bootstraps in order to do every little thing. It lets me concentrate on hackery at the macro level.
Transputer... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was at the Multicore Challenge at the UWE in Bristol, UK on Monday.
I went last year. It was fascinating.
Anyhoo... David May was there talking about multicore parallelism. It turns out that the last patent protecting the Transputer designs has lapsed.
SOoooo... if you want some open hardware get cracking! You can probably run them fast enough these days to bit-bang an LVDS/HDMI/CSI interface with little more than an amp.
Make mine the one with the 16 by 16 array please....
Seriously. Anyone got the balls to try it? I'm in!