Project Seeks To Build Inexpensive 9-inch Monitor For Raspberry Pi 176
angry tapir writes "A Kickstarter project is aiming to bring an inexpensive 9-inch portable monitor to the popular US$25 Raspberry Pi PC, which comes without a keyboard, mouse or monitor. The "HDMIPi" will include an LCD panel that will show images at a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Computers can be hooked up to the monitor via an HDMI controller board that can be wired to the LCD. The display is being made by Raspi.TV and Cyntech."
Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput (Score:4, Informative)
No, they're going to build an HDMI touchscreen with the Pi in mind. It's not a computer - it's just a screen.
Unfortunately - it isn't the Pi screen everyone wants. The thing people are screaming for is the one the Pi folks have promised us - the DSI screen.
Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput (Score:3, Informative)
Just as many as you plug-in to the USB port...
http://numato.com/8-channel-usb-gpio-module [numato.com]
You're right, it isn't that cheap, gets expensive fast, and even then makes a lousy PC.
Software hacking can be done on any system, and equipment with higher performance and open drivers are better platforms. The only reason the RPI brought back hardware hacking was because it was misdesigned, so everybody ends up swapping USB port resistors. Other than that... You can learn a lot more about hardware with a full-fledged PC, with swapable CPUs, memory, video, etc.
A few GPIO pins is ALL you can point to, and you can get BETTER I/O hardware, CHEAPER for a PC, or just buying a less expenive Arduino.
Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput (Score:5, Informative)
Arduino is very "light-duty" - this summer's best Arduino board had an 32-bit ARM processor at some 80 MHz, with 512 kB of flash and 96KB of RAM.
Meanwhile, the Raspberry PI runs at about 1GHz, has 512 MB of RAM.
Meanwhile, an x86 (64 bits) processor runs 4 or more cores at 3+ GHz and can access 16+ GB of RAM.
None of it is "better" than the other, they're just optimal for different tasks - Arduino for easy hardware work, prototyping and very low power, Raspberry PI for more processing power at a low price, and so on. Just like some people need a semi and some need an ultracompact car
Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense. For the other stuff you need to buy, a case is the only one that has to be custom made, but I bought mine for only about $8 from RS as I recall. Most modern mobile phones have MicroUSB chargers that can readily be used with the RPi. The official power supply from RS was $15 when I bought it, and now I wish I hadn't, because mobile phone chargers that can produce 5V/2A DC can be had for less than $5. And who the hell doesn't have tons of old SD cards lying around? I have dozens of old 2GB-4GB cards lying around, gathering dust, left over from old digital cameras and such. In any case I can buy a new 4GB card for approximately $5 (or an 8GB for $8), and that's more than enough space to install Raspbian. Total bill thus comes up to $35 + $8 + $5 + $5 = $53.
Now, I see that you can probably buy a refurbished 300 MHz Pentium II-based PC (which is how powerful the Raspberry Pi's processor is said to be on their FAQ) for $60-$70 or so, but it would have only 64-128 megs RAM (good luck finding more RAM compatible with it), and probably an old IDE hard drive that is smaller than the $5 SD card (sorry, SATA didn't exist when that machine was manufactured), and no or very primitive 2D/3D acceleration (no luck doing H.264 decoding on such hardware, so it can't even run XBMC), and it consumes ten times more power. So you just spent $20 more for a machine inferior in almost every way to the Raspberry Pi. Good call.
Re:Gee, they're going to build an ARM-based comput (Score:5, Informative)
Negative
DSI = Display Serial Interface
http://www.mipi.org/specifications/display-interface [mipi.org]