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The Raspberry Pi has sold 10 million units - continuing its success as the most popular British computer ever.
The computer, about the same size as a credit card, was first released in 2012 and is widely used as an educational tool for programming.
However, it can also be used for many practical purposes such as streaming music to several devices in a house.
A new starter kit for Raspberry Pi, including a keyboard and mouse, has been released to celebrate the success.
The kit also includes an SD storage card, official case, power supply, HDMI cable, mouse, keyboard and guidebook - it costs £99 plus VAT and will be available in the coming weeks.
Congratulations and thanks to Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation for getting a whole new generation of kids interested in computing and reigniting passion for technology among old curmudgeonly techies.
Also reported here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @08:18AM
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B: $35
Raspberry Pi Starter Kit: $140
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2016, @08:23AM
Miniaturization has produced such a cheap computer that all the bulky human interface peripherals cost more than the computer itself. The solution is clear: implant the computer directly into the human skull.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by theluggage on Friday September 09 2016, @11:35AM
To quote the Raspberry Pi site:
This is an unashamedly premium product: the latest Raspberry Pi, official accessories, the best USB peripherals we could find, and a copy of the highest-rated Raspberry Pi book.
Or, to put it another way, you're paying over the odds for convenience, not needing another computer to download the OS, a nice all-in-one box to give someone as a present and some assurance that the bits are decent quality and safe - and maybe throwing in a donation to the Raspberry Pi foundation. I've just totted up the same case, plus cheap'n'cheerful PSU, keyboard, mouse, SD card and HDMI cable online and it all comes to about £26 - so I suspect you could put it together for 30 of your US dollars. Or, you could go to the high street and pay $140 for just the HDMI cable...
...then again, a big slice of the Pi market consists of tech enthusiasts who will already have cupboards full of that sort of bric-a-brac and will just need the Pi and, maybe, a case.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday September 09 2016, @11:51AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Friday September 09 2016, @03:04PM
Here's a Z80 kit for ~90$ - https://www.tindie.com/products/Semachthemonkey/rc2014-homebrew-z80-computer-kit/ [tindie.com]
The big difference being that the RPi kit involves plugging different parts together and something like the Z80 requires hours of soldering and it might not work. I'm with you that an inferior system might actually teach more.
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(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 09 2016, @05:18PM
Here's a Z80 kit for ~90$
I know its a nerd project for nerds to do so that they've done it, and I salute that, but for maximum amusement, scroll down to the bit about the serial terminal board that adds a video & keyboard to the (serial only) Z80 board... yes folks, its done by plugging in a Raspberry Pi Zero (which could probably emulate the Z80 faster than the real thing runs)... and I bet it still works out far cheaper than adding a "proper" (?) video/keyboard interface.
In electronics, volume production is everything...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday September 09 2016, @05:27PM
lol! Retrocomputing, where your decoding logic is a microprocessor that is 100x faster than your main CPU.
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(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday September 10 2016, @05:01PM
I'm with you that an inferior system might actually teach more.
It's not that the BBC is inferior, it's that it was carefully designed for teaching computing. You turn on the BBC and you're immediately at a prompt that you can type a program into and run individual lines of BASIC as a REPL. The dialect of BASIC that it used had full support for structured programming, a built-in assembler (you could generate strings in BASIC and assemble them), several graphics modes, multi-channel sound, and direct access to memory (importantly, I/O memory). It also had a range of I/O ports that were very easy to use from BASIC.
sudo mod me up