Raspberry Pi Wins UK's Top Engineering Award (bbc.com) 54
An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: The team behind the device was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert Prize at a ceremony in London last night. The tiny computer launched in 2012. Its designers hoped to introduce children to coding and had modest ambitions. They beat two other finalists, cyber-security company Darktrace and radiotherapy pioneers Vision RT, to win the prize. Previous winners of the innovation award, which has been run since 1969, include the creators of the CT (computerised tomography) scanner; the designers of the Severn Bridge; and the team at Microsoft in Cambridge that developed the Kinect motion sensor.
Sweet! Congratulations!!!! (Score:2)
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a power button was too much to ask for, though, it seems ;(
and usb/ethernet is still broken-by-design.
after all these years, still no sata, either.
feh.
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They are jealous (Score:3, Funny)
Europe is jealous of our American know-how, freedom and democracy and so fine us and withhold awards and respect.
If they hate our freedom so much why dont they invent their own system and stop the criticism and whining.
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Does Europe lose bragging rights on Raspberry Pi due to Brexit? Interesting that Minix chose its ARM implementation to be on the Beaglebone rather than Raspberry Pi. A combination of Minix on the Pi would have been a very good learning platform
American equivalents of that - Beaglebone & Arduino. But I'd like to see a US solution that's not based on the British ARM, but on a US born CPU, such as RISC-V or MIPS. Or maybe even SPARC or Power.
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ARM is Japanese
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/18/tech-giant-arm-holdings-sold-to-japanese-firm-for-24bn
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So was that
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Arduino è italiano
(thanks Google translate)
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Pretty sure the UK will still be part of Europe whether they're in the European Union or not.
Anyway I just received my 2nd Pi Zero W (built in wifi) this week. The first one was faulty. It could only see Access Points that were very close. Apparently it's not been an isolated problem. The 2nd one works great and the range is pretty impressive considering the lack of an external antenna. Incredibly versatile, fun, and inexpensive device. So congratulat
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Hahahaha, no. All the morons that use this PoS get what they deserve: Bad networking, bad USB, bad, sensitive I/O lines, bad thermal behavior, and a lot more design fails that an actual engineer would never have made. The only thing they did well is marketing.
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Well deserved- (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty great when a platform comes along and snares giant subsets of people across multiple disciplines.
The Pi has earned its place in pop culture, industry, creativity, criminal and business enterprise, education... the list goes on and on.
I've personally introduced a handful of very young people to the pi as both a robotics, and IoT platform, and watched them sprout from typical minecraft zombie, to budding bot-and-automation-expert in training.
And that price point? Pretty Amazing.
Kudos to the Raspberry Pie Foundation, they really are changing the world.
I just wish shipping and availability was not such an issue, but it's fine 80% of the time, and suppliers always make it right.... with time.
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RPI is a huge marketing success. Looking at it from an engineering perspective, it's a bit "640k is enough for everyone".
Powersupply is working at the very limits of the envelope (voltage, not current), no power switch, the usb controller is overloaded, 100Mbit ethernet is what you get and the amount of RAM is quite limited unless you are just using it for simple things.
It's like VHS all over again, it's actually quite a shitty little device, but everyone is supporting it, making it kind of the obvious choi
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It really does look like you are missing the point.
The whole idea behind the pie is to make not just cheap hardware, but really cheap hardware that the young are not worried about smoking. Every corner has been cut, not the just the expensive ones. It's designed from the start as an educational development board.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation works to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world, so they are capable of understanding and shaping our increasingly digital world, able to solve the problems that matter to them, and equipped for the jobs of the future.
We provide low-cost, high-performance computers that people use to learn, solve problems and have fun. We provide outreach and education to help more people access computing and digital making. We develop free resources to help people learn about computing and how to make things with computers, and train educators who can guide other people to learn.
You WANT the kid to have to pull the juice for every reset, and you want him to eventually come to the same point you made, and you want him to wire a momentary into the reset pin, or a slide to th
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Alright AC, wife's asleep, kids are gone, and I'm drinkin'. I just beat beat streetfighter III on 1 credit, HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!
Aha, so in essence you're saying it's designed to fail from wearing out the connectors. Gotcha. Stupid
It's designed to teach. It's as if you unhappy with the plastic beach shovel because you can't dig the moat around your yard with it.
but I guess that's one way to sell more of them.
Don't be silly, 10M+ Sold. We buy more because we keep showing the kids how to build things.
"Kids having to pull the juice" has to be about the stupidest justification for not putting in a power switch ever. As if kids couldn't learn by pushing a button, designed for that purpose rather than pulling a cord. *scoff*
KID CANNOT PUSH THE BUTTON IF YOU DISABLE HIS HAND! j/k, you are obviously not a parent, and as such, are not expected to understand how incredibly stupid that statement reads. No worries buddy, I'm sure there is some angry old bitch out there looking for you too.
Secondly, "it's for education" cop-out is really getting old.
Tough shit buddy, we're going to keep teaching the next generation, like it or not. God-damn curmudgeon. There's a kid on yer lawn.
Thirdly, yeah the adapter bitch it's weak. It's so weak that it takes some rather dedicated mental filtering to browse the forums to not see all the people who run into problems because of flaky adapters or cables.
My 10 year old built a power-switch out of tin-foil, maybe he can help you out? Those stupid forums are for children anyway, right?
Finally, people who do neat and useful stuff with the PI does it despite its design, not thanks to it.
That's the whole idea you crotchety old fucker, you make to see if you can. Any fool can spin a LAMP server out of a pile of old dead computers, but it takes a special kind of maker to make dad a wifi coffee machine that remembers when and how I want it. Even if mom hates the look of it.
The contention never was that it's useless or can't be made to work - just like VHS was for many years fit for what it was used for, or the 640k - but that the margins are way too thin and the reasons given for cutting corners to the extent they are makes no sense neither from a cost nor from a usability point of view. In fact they are cut in a way which not only artificially limits its capabilities but as the proverbial cherry on top, creates a whole host of different problems
I agree with this entire statement. You and I can hangout after all. I knew you would come around, lets build another time machine.
for no good reasons at all.
It's like your not absorbing the things you've been reading. Maybe it's all of that shit between your ears?
In plain English, the trade offs are really not worth the insignificant or even imaginary cost savings.
These are not trade-offs clownshoe, nor are they done to save costs, but rather to force the user to adapt the board to his/her own needs. If it did have a powers-witch I bet you would be crying about how you always have to turn this damn thing on yourself.
Do yourself a favor. Meet a young person. Teach them the difference between this shit board, that shit board, and whatever you would use instead. Show them how to measure the voltage drop over a sub-par powercable. Explain to them exactly why it's better to spin up hardware with a powerswitch. Extol the virtues of the all holy barrel connector, even though all the young person knows is mini/micro USB and those godforsaken apple chargers. Show them how to write 640k worth of python or c or whatever you want. Lead that young person through your process of concept-design-build..... or you know.... don't.
I bet this formatting is atrocious... SEND IT!
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Powersupply is working at the very limits of the envelope (voltage, not current), no power switch, the usb controller is overloaded, 100Mbit ethernet is what you get and the amount of RAM is quite limited unless you are just using it for simple things.
What a load of drivel. Firstly with "operating at the very limits of the envelope". Wtf are you even talking about? 5V is standard and it operates within specs of standard 5V devices. The very limits would be the never ending push towards low power and low current where 3.3V or 1.8V are even more popular. There's nothing "at the very limits" for the PSU.
And the entire rest of your comment completely fails to understand the purpose of the device, its design choices, and the reason why it is as popular as it
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You sir, are a moron and doesn't know jack shit about electricity. That's all there is to it.
The adapter is limited to 5V and can never deliver any more than that. Depending on your adapter, it might not even reach that if you happen to have a bad one.
The cable have resistance, which according to old Ohm causes the voltage to drop. This means that you're getting less than 5V at the device. Depending on the quality of your micro usb cable, it can be pretty close, or it can be significantly less
So, already th
Despite having a major USB defect? (Score:1)
Interesting to see them get an engineering award despite having a major defect (unfixed USB bandwidth issues) in their SoC.