ModMyPi Raspberry Pi Case Offers 5% Back To the Foundation 82
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi Model B is now available to purchase, but most people are still waiting for new stock to be manufactured and delivered. In the meantime you can prepare for the tiny PC's arrival by figuring out what to do about a case. The fact the Raspberry Pi ships without a case doesn't cause a problem when using it, but encasing it in plastic will help protect and keep the dust off the components. Geek.com has already reported on one case design from hobbyist designer Marco Alici, but now another one has appeared that actually has a release date, color options, and an extra incentive to purchase it."
Quick! (Score:2, Funny)
It's been a week since the last Raspberry Pi article, quick, let's create another that doesn't have much to say!
I had a girlfriend like that once. She'd phone me up in the middle of the night to see if I still loved her.
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Let me get this straight... you posted a contentless comment to complain about the lack of content, yet over-commentary on a given subject? Somehow I doubt the girlfriend story; First, this is slashdot, so I reject any claims of girlfriend/wife by default. In this case, though, I doubt that anyone near you is unclear on how you feel on any subject. I had a friend like you once... I had to unplug my phone at night to prevent him from calling me and telling me that he still didn't like infomercials.
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First, this is slashdot, so I reject any claims of girlfriend/wife by default.
If she's calling in the middle of the night she's likely to be a bunny boiler.
Even slashdotters can get that sort of girlfriend.
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Just for the record, every girl I've ever dated has done the same thing. You'd think women were insecure or something.
Re:Quick! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you're dating only insecure women, because you're insecure yourself?
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Who the hell is moderating today? None of the comments I've seen so far except the first one have anything whatever to do with the Raspberry Pi, yet these offtopic comments are being modded up!
WTF? I didn't come here to read about your damned love lives, I came to read about Pi cases. I plan on getting a Pi and building an MP3 player out of it, and maybe a complete entertainment system in time. I want to hear what others are planning to do.
But you guys just want to talk about your imaginary girlfriends. How
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Who the hell is moderating today? None of the comments I've seen so far except the first one have anything whatever to do with the Raspberry Pi, yet these offtopic comments are being modded up!
Well, I guess that's part of the complaint of the thread starter: There have been so many Raspberry Pi articles recently that there's not much on topic to talk about.
I personally plan to use my Raspberry Pi for XBMC (esp. for AirPlay) as a cheap replacement for an Apple TV.
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this says far less about women in general than it does about the apparently limited subset of women who are interested in dating you. perhaps if you were less quick to generalise about the former set based solely on your experiences with the latter set, the size of the latter set would increase.
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Re:Quick! (Score:5, Informative)
Can't please everybody, but just the other day I thought about how I will mount my Pi when it comes, and now I have a solution handed to me, which even has an incentive that goes beyond meeting my material need.
That's the thing with slashvertisements, they don't bring much discussion value, but they are usually something unique and interesting that I would not have thought to search for. And as long as they don't seriously dilute the more substantial submissions, what's the harm?
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Am I the only one who was thinking something when reading this?
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Mmmmm, I like the warm raspberry kind the best.
This is not the post you're looking for. (Score:1)
If you really think this is all useless and not really going to happen, then why don't you ignore it? That would be the reasonable thing to do.
By posting here, you are drawing attention to something that you don't like. No one compelled you to read any of the posts about the Raspberry Pi system. If you are right, ignore it and it will go away.
Your position is self contradictory. What is wrong with you>
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Did you?
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Not for very bloody long.
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Location: MightyMartian's bedroom.
Time: 03:15.
(phone rings, MightyMartian answers the phone)
MightyMartian: Hello? Who the hell is calling me at 03:15?
Caller: Hello MightyMartian, it's your girlfriend! Do you still love me?
MightyMartian: Oh damnit, fuck you.
Caller: Okay, I'll be right over! I love you too!
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Not very far from the truth at all.
Only available for pre-order (Score:1)
I wouldn't say that they're ready for purchase, seeing as how I pre-ordered mine at launch and it hasn't shipped yet.
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Or given that the first round sold out almost immediately and the next batch isn't due until August (according to Newark's inventory, anyway). So yeah, saying that they are "available for purchase" is something of a stretch....
At this rate, I'm not expecting to be able to bulk order in the quantities I'd be interested in buying until at least 2013, by which time I doubt I'll still care.
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It's the Amazon, Reebok, Walmart, and Apple model. Advertise new goods and only provide enough to satisfy the first 10% of customers while the other 90% are left on waitlists.
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it doesn't seem that they satisfied _any_ customers. take a look at pi's forums. threads which ask where the first batch is get closed, because it's irrelevant apparently. hadn't taken a look in a month and golly, it's the same state as 3 months ago. or 6 months ago. it's like it's an investment scam forum. it's like steorn forums, not good for finding information but good for finding pie in the sky dreams about what you could do with the product and the fanboism shows in the mod process. actually it's like
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Exactly- I'm half expecting to lose my $35 (+ god knows what shipping and taxes, since that wasn't clear when I ordered). This _might_ still work out, but I'm not holding my breath. They've already raised the prices- while claiming it was a good thing, and clearly scrubbing their forums to remove any dissent or even questions about their price and borderline(?) lies about their manufacturing status. It reeks of scam.
The other similar experience though was the galileoscope- which was run by well meaning folk
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At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world. Hell, in under a year I'm sure they could get local manufacuring ramped up to the point that any cost difference is negligible. This is all the more important when you are trying to set an educational example for future domain experts with your product.
And, frankly, the
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Except that it wasn't cheaper or faster. Heck,even the tax structure was against them. Importing components was taxed while importing the finished board wasn't. It was their intent to build locally and wasn't possible at the price point they wanted to hit.
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At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world.
Uh-huh. Because the rest of the world is local to $YOUR_COUNTRY, and it's cheaper to produce electronics in $YOUR_COUNTRY because Anonymous Coward says so. Convincing.
We're still waiting for them to point-out the specific clause. No-one else seems to be affected by it.
Except all of the electronics manufacturers who are doing their production in $OTHER_COUNTRY and also seem unable to justify producing their electronics in $YOUR_COUNTRY.
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At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world. Hell, in under a year I'm sure they could get local manufacuring ramped up to the point that any cost difference is negligible.
That'd be great if it were true, but it simply isn't. There's a huge amount of capital equipment, skills and expertise that's needed for efficient electronics manufacturing and a few hundred thousand boards is no where near enough to support this kind of investment. Cheap labour might give China an edge, but it's economies of scales and manufacturing experience that make them hard to compete with.
I've been involved in outsourcing electronics manufacture from Australia and the Chinese companies we've
Re:fuck the raspberry pi (Score:4, Informative)
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I think they eventually changed this after everyone yelled about it, but originally their selected retailers were adding hefty extra charges on top of VAT and shipping [raspberrypi.org] in quite a few EU countries. You may not have noticed the complaining because they stuck all discussion of the retailers and pricing in the off-topic section of the forum and closed a lot of the threads just like this [raspberrypi.org].
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I think they eventually changed this after everyone yelled about it, but originally their selected retailers were adding hefty extra charges on top of VAT and shipping [raspberrypi.org] in quite a few EU countries. You may not have noticed the complaining because they stuck all discussion of the retailers and pricing in the off-topic section of the forum and closed a lot of the threads just like this [raspberrypi.org].
psshh. the pi rdf means that you should be excited for a product that's both _cheap_ and _charitable_, if you got something negative that's OFF TOPIC. doesn't matter if there's no actual charity aspect(it's in pipeline) or if everyone involved is making money from the product. but it's not a product, since that would imply being a business selling to consumers which would imply some responsibilities.
(another offtopic note is that you can get android comps on a puck with hdmi out, remote control in etc for 7
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They're trying to make it as cheap as possible. Even TFA mentions this.
And they've already raised the price to accommodate their resellers, so obviously price wasn't as fixed as they originally claimed anyway...
ORLY? [alliedelec.com]
Lego Case (Score:2, Interesting)
I figured I'd just build a small case for mine out of legos. Fun, easily modified, and undeniably geeky - if owning a Raspberry Pi isn't already enough of a geek sign.
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I just looked-up the specs. What would I do with 256 MB of RAM? That's the same size as my P3 laptop and it runs slow as snails (using the hard drive as memory).
I guess I could run the Commodore Amiga OS (4), since it's nice and compact, but it requires a PowerPC not..... whatever Raspberry uses. Hmmm. Puppy Linux maybe?
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For $25 though this would be fun to see my family's reaction. "What's that?"
A computer. ;-)
"THAT'S a computer?"
Yes.
"You're fooling me aren't you?"
No really it's a computer. Let me turn it on and show you.
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That exact thing happened to me in a bar the other day. I had my little notebook with me, tagging MP3s and somebody asks "Is that anything like a computer?"
I was dumbfounded for a second and said "it IS a computer" and showed them Google. Wound up looking up a dog show on YouTube for them, and reminded myself that having someone spill a beer on your computer isn't the only reason not to take it to the bar.
Re:Lego Case (Score:4, Informative)
The hardware acceleration for video on the board is actually quite impressive. It can apparently decode 1080p video in real time, so even if it can't run a modern desktop very fast it can still be useful; there's a port of XMBC so you can use it as a media centre. You have to have proprietary drivers for the graphics acceleration but it's still cool. I'm not sure how integrated into the normal X11 stack these drivers are by now, earlier on in the project you'd just use the graphics library provided and drive the screen without X (as I understood it).
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The hardware acceleration for video on the board is actually quite impressive
And that's all there is. The CPU can't even run Ubuntu because Ubuntu requires a more current ARM version. 256MB of RAM is good for servers, but that's not the selling point, what with the expensive SoC and decoder licenses, is it? Here's what Mozilla lists as requirements for Mobile Firefox: "Installation requires about 17 MB internal or SD card storage and 512 MB of RAM". Oh, it also requires an ARMv7 processor. The Raspberry Pi CPU is an ARMv6.
The Raspberry Pi is a cellphone with a very low-end CPU, low-
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Who cares if it can't run Ubuntu? Ubuntu, since the enforcement of Unity, has become the Windows ME of the Linux world. I've moved all my machines across to Debian 6 now and I have to say, all that stuff you think Ubuntu is giving you, it's not :-)
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Re:Lego Case (Score:4, Interesting)
Ubuntu doesn't run because of Canonical's compilation settings. During a recent fosdem talk, an ARM/Linaro representative expressed dismay that 'armel' is defined differently between debian and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu are focussing on performance over 'legacy' CPUs - the latest debian ought to run - no speed demon, naturally.
As for firefox, well, gecko's not the only browser in town and until recently 256MB was commonplace on webkit-based Android and iOS (iPhone 3GS) devices. Some browsers optimise for performance, others memory usage.
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Up until this point, there haven't really been any ARMv6 devices that you'd really want to run Ubuntu on anyway - from what I can tell they're pretty much all either ancient smart phones with small screens or headless embedded devices with no floating point support. Speaking of floating point, Debian's probably going to be quite slow on the Raspberry Pi because its ARMv6 version doesn't have hardware floating point support - it was aimed at those FPU-less embedded devices.
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70 bucks, has case, wifi, android 2.3, hdmi out, 512mb, usb ports.. point being, pi isn't cheap. it's stripped down.
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/mini-1080p-android-2-3-network-media-player-w-wifi-tf-usb-hdmi-rj45-black-116857 [dealextreme.com]
it would be nice for projects for hobbyists, but that's against their stated charity goal...
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If you don't know what to do with 256MiB of RAM you are not the target market. 256MiB is plenty, you only think it is not because you're comparing with a laptop (which is a mistake; laptops are huge, expensive and power hungry (and, of course, fast, with lots of HD space, etc); the two are different beasts altogether).
Re:Lego Case (Score:5, Insightful)
What would I do with 256 MB of RAM?
I love these sorts of posts. My first computer had 16K of RAM (TRS-80). I do hobby work with embedded controller CPUs [microchip.com] that have a whopping 384 BYTES of RAM, and I can do all sorts of cool things - take temp/pres readings and send them to the mother ship via ZigBee, etc.There are even TCP stacks for these sorts of chips that have somewhat more memory.
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I just looked-up the specs. What would I do with 256 MB of RAM? That's the same size as my P3 laptop and it runs slow as snails (using the hard drive as memory).
You're doing something wrong, then. My server is a PPC Mac Mini running Debian, and it has 256 MB of RAM. The desktop I used ~4 years ago had 32 MB or 64 MB, and ran Debian. No problems.
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That's a great idea. I wonder if it would fit inside the death star that came with my buildable galaxy [lego.com] set. That would be awesome. I'll need to check today. Though I'm not sure how the ports would line up - maybe put a box around the board and then use the halves of the death star like bread on a sandwich. Might still look good. It will be fun trying out all kinds of options. I wonder if there would be a market for various themed cases.
Sticking out ports (Score:2, Insightful)
Please rename the headline to "Random guy designs case that doesn't quite fit a product that noone can get yet"
Re:Sticking out ports (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus, so make your own, Mr. Clever. Seriously. 3D printing is so cheap, put your design where your mouth is.
Re:Sticking out ports (Score:4, Insightful)
[...] 3D printing is so cheap [...]
*NOW* it feels like the 21st century! Finally!
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Actually the headline should be: "Random guy designs pi case that is annoying as hell, pledges money back to foundation to alleviate pain of using it".
The protrusion around the USB ports will create annoyances, ethernet cables won't "click" and lock into place due to the base being in the way and, as you said, the HDMI-port will probably create problems as well. Not really a shining example of good industrial design.
Beside all the bitching, there is a point here (Score:5, Insightful)
All this bitching about the Raspberry in general and this case goes to show just how fucking hard it is to make a good solid product. We barely think about it but for every product out there we just use without issue, a hell of a lot of people spend a hell of a lot of time, just getting it right.
Take something as simple as a drinks can, you know the kind you get soft-drinks in. Once, they had pull of tabs, and those tabs had sharp edges and they got thrown away and people stepped on them with bare feet and got hurt. That is why nowadays, can's have a opening that opens inwards leaving all bits attached.
It took DECADES for this to change. It might now seem like rocket science but clearly it was.
Apple seems famous for good design yet its white mac-book air, the plastic one, when opened had rounded edges for the bit on your desk, and sharp edges for you to lay your hands on... not very comfortable at all. A minor issue? You would think BUT this issue is known about (how many keyboards have hard sharp edges to lay your wrist on?) and yet, Apple made this mistake again when the problem should have been known as well as the solution.
When you make a thingy like this raspberry board there a million things to think off, often things that someone somewhere has already solved but getting all that knowledge into one place has never been done (go ahead, point me to a resource where every mistake in designing say an MP3 player has been recorded, let alone with the solution) and so mistakes will be re-made and re-solved over and over again.
If you ever think of making your own product, estimate the time you need to make it, then add ten times that time to examine it against all other similar products so you can prevent making the same mistakes they did.
Good luck getting that approved for budget. So more then a hundred years after the first keyboards, we still get keyboards with hard sharp edges biting into our wrists...
And you worry about a cable not clicking.
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You should listen to what this guy says. People from Alpha Centauri are much more evolved than we are.
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It seems like increasing the resting comfort of an area upon which one's wrists shouldn't be resting in the first place would just ultimately serve to increase physical injuries.
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Strikes me that the Raspberry Pi designers are as much at fault here - to my mind it looked like a perfectly nice case that was spoiled by an odd board design that didn't have the sockets all lined up relative to each other.
Time to trick your Pi out (Score:3)
Just for clarification (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not an "hobbist designer", as written in many blogs. I'm a Mechanical Engineer and I work as Industrial Designer since 2001 (see http://marcoalici.wordpress.com/info). ;)
My case is designed to be printed by Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com),using highly professional SLS (Selective Laser Sintering), SLA (Stereolithography), and FDM (fused deposition modeling machines. Nothing to do with the overall quality of home/DIY hobbyist fused-wire deposition processes. That's why it's not so cheap.
Just as a clarification.
Best regards,
Marco Alici
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Marco, thanks for the info! I am still waiting for my Pi, but will see what I do with it when I get it. Still, nice design!
Also, I'd recommend you get an account in future when you post, because AC accounts are always at low level (and therefore invisible to most people). We're not that bad here :) If I had mod points I'd mod you up, but I'm out at the moment.
Thanks for your work as well :)
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Still, pretty cool work. Out of curiosity, what CAD package did you use to design it? I am thinking of getting into 3D printing, but still need to find some CAD software (preferably that works on Linux) so I can start designing.
I used Autodesk Inventor. For 3D printing you could just use a 3D modeller such as Blender. IMHO the only usable CAD software on Linux is VariCAD at the moment. But is not free, even if it's not so expensive.