from the Raspberry-Pi-justin-time-for-Thanksgiving dept.
The big news in Raspberry Pi circles yesterday was the release of the new Raspberry Pi Zero a higher clocked, updated, smaller version of the original Raspberry Pi.
Exciting as that is, what seems much more news worthy is that the price point of just £4 means that they can include 10,000 of them on the Mag Pi print magazine available on sale yesterday.
In this video run down of the features done by The Raspberry Pi Guy YouTube you can see it happily run Minecraft: Pi Edition and is reported to run most software without issue.
The only down side with the new Pi appears to be the micro connectors. Various companies willing to set you up with kits to fill the void.
Also beware of the P&P (postage and packaging) from various retailers, a £4 Pi Zero with triple the carriage.
[Specs provided after the break.]
- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
- 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
- 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
- A micro-SD card slot
- A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
- Micro-USB sockets for data and power
- An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
- Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
- An unpopulated composite video header
- Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm
At that price, I'd be tempted to get a baker's dozen of them and make my own little Beowolf cluster.
Related Stories
Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers which are using the board in their designs. The higher end Raspberry Pi boards are also reasonable desktop units for many typical home office uses, so they are being distributed in place of laptops to many working at home for the NHS. The Raspberry Pi is a low wattage single-board computer with convenient input-output hardware suitable for embedded applications but running a full Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, Raspbian.
As the need for ventilators grows, manufacturers are looking for control boards to serve as the brains of their devices. Recently, Intel was reportedly asked to produce 20,000 Broadwell processors to meet demand from medical companies. Because of its production abilities, Raspberry Pi Foundation is able to provide those orders quickly.
"One of the main challenges with rapidly scaling manufacture of products like this is that you may be able to surge production of the air-handling elements, but you still need to provide the control element: often the components you need are on 20-week lead times and (hopefully) we'll be out of the other side of this pandemic by then," said Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi. "Raspberry Pi 'builds to stock' rather than 'building to order,' so we generally have products either on-hand or in the pipeline with short lead times."
Even though Raspberry Pi builds to stock, the organization has still experienced a shortage of Raspberry Pi Zero Units, due to demand from consumers as well as the foundation's desire to hold stock for ventilator manufacturers. Upton says that the organization produced 192,000 Zero-line (Pi Zero / Zero W) products in Q1 but plans to increase that number to 250,000 going forward.
The BBC is reporting that Raspberry Pi-based ventilators are currently being tested in several locations. No word yet on how the certification process is going.
Related:
Raspberry Pi will power ventilators for COVID-19 patients
Raspberry Pi's $5 model is powering ventilators to fight coronavirus
Previously:
(2020) Company Prioritizes $15k Ventilators Over Cheaper Model Specified in Contract
(2020) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic
(2019) Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT
(2019) Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Compute Module 3+, the Last 40nm-Based RasPi
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
(2015) Raspberry Pi's Latest Computer Costs Just $5
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Friday November 27 2015, @02:18PM
I believe that edition of MagPi has sold out already :-(
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 27 2015, @03:13PM
That's really great. I've been working for a couple years to bring computing to every student in our kids' school, which is a smaller, Title 1 (most of the kids qualify for free lunch) elementary school in Brooklyn. A $5 price tag is phenomenal, and well within reach of our PTA being able to purchase them for high needs kids.
I've also been thinking about building a little render farm. RPi sips energy and at this price I could buy a lot of them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday November 27 2015, @06:42PM
How you going to power them? How you going to control them?
If you are buying them for the kids you need a $5 computer, plus a keyboard (and mouse - sigh), plus a hdml cable, plus a microsd card. And then what will they do? In the 80s I learnt about programming when I was POKEing values into games to get more lives. Just because it worked 30 years ago doesn't mean it will work now, you'll need some form of network.
Sure, for specific cool tasks in your electronics section yes, you could build a christmas tree light controller or something. For "computing" now, you need an IP address.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:23PM
For "computing" now, you need an IP address.
Nope.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday November 27 2015, @09:32PM
For all practical purposes yes, you do need an IP address.
Sure, an engineer can set up a sneakernet, or he can connect a USB-Ethernet adapter. Most of my MCU designs have no Ethernet, or even an OS. But this is not something that you would expect from beginners. A teacher or a lab tech can set up boards like that... but the overall cost, especially labor, would exceed the cost of classical R-Pi with Ethernet.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday November 27 2015, @03:16PM
over clocked
That's not really what "overclocked" means...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 27 2015, @03:56PM
Yup, fixed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @04:36PM
Over-clocked?
That's when you have to work late, but you're getting time and a half.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday November 27 2015, @03:22PM
This thing is cheaper than the casing and cabling it takes to deploy it. I've spent a good part of my professional life with robotic devices that have a network of local controllers to drive stepper motors and related machinery. At $5 for the whole board, it could completely own that sector. Also, the IoT comes to mind, but here the 2835's heritage as a video processor brings the lack of Ethernet. Not that this is neccessarily catastrophic, because for those applications, isolated RS-485 might have much more trouble-proof electrics than ethernet, and it does have a serial port.
I gave it a quick search, but didn't find all the details, so I ask: Does the Linux Kernel have out-of-the-box facilities to run IP over multi-drop serial? The two things needed would be multi-client LCP/IPCP for PPP on one wire and some sort of CDMA, e.g. holding back transmissions while someone else is on the line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @04:26PM
It's much more powerful than my $100+ TI graphing calculators.
I wonder if I can hook it up to a portable screen and put some advanced graphing and other calculator functions on it and use it as a portable graphing calculator.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 27 2015, @05:27PM
TI graphics calcs have long been crippled in relation to what is possible. For commercial and legal (exam taking) reasons.
The less popular Casio Prizm [cemetech.net] seems to have a far better CPU than TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition [cemetech.net], and they beat TI to color screens by years. Similar story with HP Prime [cemetech.net]. TI-Nspire CX [cemetech.net] seems to have picked up the slack though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Monday November 30 2015, @08:53PM
Though it's still only available on pre-order you might like the Pocket C.H.I.P [nextthing.co] which is just what you describe. A tiny single board computer with a handheld keyboard/screen case. They were pretty loudly proclaiming a revolution with their "World's First $9 Computer!", but I think this announcement is going to steal some of their steam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @04:56PM
Looks like there's not wifi (that I could see on the specs), so add a usb-to-go cable +wifi dongle, now more expensive than the $9 CHIP computer.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 27 2015, @06:03PM
The CHIP requires extra add-on boards that are physically larger and cost more than the entire base board just to have HDMI output though, which is standard on the $5 Pi. So it depends what you plan to build with the thing...
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Friday November 27 2015, @06:55PM
CHIP is also 8 dollars for the weekend.
http://getchip.com/ [getchip.com]
Both of them are exciting developments. I'm really excited for the Pocket CHIP which the Raspberry Pi does not compete with.
Here are some CHIP specs for comparison:
1Ghz Allwinner A13
Mali400 GPU
512MB ram
4GB onboard flash
wifi and bluetooth onboard
Similar to this new rpi, but the CHIP requires a dongle for video, CHIP has some onboard memory but only USB for expansion, and the integrated wifi/bluetooth benefits the CHIP a lot. It looks like the new rpi has lost the ethernet port.
(Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Friday November 27 2015, @06:38PM
Looks like there's not wifi (that I could see on the specs), so add a usb-to-go cable +wifi dongle, now more expensive than the $9 CHIP computer.
So, Pi Zero lacks WiFi and doesn't come with any storage (needs a Micro SD card)... CHIP has WiFi and BT, but doesn't have HDMI without a $15 piggyback card... OTOH, maybe you don't need WiFi in your project and with the Pi you can swap the SD cards in a jiffy... I guess you can develop your code one of the bigger Pis then just pop the SD card into the Zero... Swings and roundabouts: hooray for choice.
The point is that the mainboards are all sufficiently dirt cheap that you're not going to be traumatized if you let the magic smoke out or your home-made drone is shot down by the USAF, and if you want to dedicate one to controlling your fish tank you just buy another. The manufacturers achieve the low prices by deciding what to leave out.
That said, looks like the Pi Zero was mainly a one-off stunt to put a 'free' computer on a magazine cover, they're already like hen's teeth and they haven't committed to long-term production yet. But then the CHIP isn't generally available yet, either.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 27 2015, @05:31PM
It looks like the exact same CPU, single-core ARM1176JZF-S, except that the clock is 1 GHz rather than 700 MHz (~42% performance increase).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @06:08PM
This product will extend the past dominance they had in single board computers into a position where they now pretty much end the 'Arduino' fad with a single blow. But it will still not do jack for their stated mission of teaching kids to program. The problem there was not hardware prices and it still isn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:13PM
The RasPi only has a few I/O pins, which strictly limit its ability to Do Fun Stuff to the sort of thing you'd do at a school science fair - lights on, lights off, play some music, maybe.
The Arduino has, like, 16 pins optimized for digital I/O, and 16 pins optimized for analog I/O. That's a lot of input/output, IMHO.
The RasPi is a fun toy and is suitable for introducing kids to programming - they can go as deep as they want to go. When they are done they have a useful workstation they can pass on to their little brother or sister. As others have noted this would be excellent for cash-strapped schools who still want to challenge their brightest students.
ObURL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Hardware [wikipedia.org]
The Arduino is much more suitable for the role of development platform than is the RasPi, but after R&D is done one might benefit from looking into other computer-on-a-chip solutions that are perhaps better designed to resist industrial environments and customer abuse - same CPU, but different layouts and packaging, perhaps.
ObURL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#Hardware [wikipedia.org]
My $0.02, YMMV, etc.
~childo
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 27 2015, @07:20PM
I don't think it will end arduino, even though it is cheaper. Your arduino program owns the hardware it is running on. No competition for cycles or time. It can only do what you programmed it to do. The pi is very different though. It has a whole OS with hundreds of programs. It is so complete that you can self-program with it. One is a micro-controller and the other is a (very small) computer.
I completely agree with the programming thing. I think that eventually schools will understand the whole "you can lead a horse to water" thing. Exposure is good! But expecting everyone to love programming is not.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @07:36PM
So? The AVR cpu runs at 16MHz. You could almost certainly do a cycle accurate emulation on the Broadcom running at 1GHz. Quantity has a quality of its own and when you are running 62 times as fast before you even take proper account of the fact the ARM11 is more efficient per clock it isn't even close. But note what I point out in another comment about the price one pays in power consumption...
As for programming everyone is still missing the point. The Pi is programmed (as they envision in their printer textbooks, etc) in Python. Hello, you can run Python on anything, including on a USB stick booted on pretty much any PC or hosted in an virtual machine. Now later they do try using the Pi for some basic 'Maker' level embedded stuff but just buy a I/O board with a USB port such as the ones they sell for Android devices. The point is that by the time you get your 'cheap' Pi and scrounge up an HDMI display, keyboard, mouse, network, etc. you may as well just use the PC you were scrounging most of that stuff off of in the first place since it is far more capable. Even a junker PC you could buy for the $35 sticker price of a Pi2. But none of that is the problem. The problem is getting anyone interested in programming today when nobody is interested in simple programs you can download a thousand clones of already and anything more requires first mastering a dozen frameworks that -nobody- actually understands but means you can't start simple anymore since they assume a higher then entry level of programming mastery just to invoke them correctly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Friday November 27 2015, @11:05PM
You could only if you didn't have time sensitive parts. If you were doing any communication by clock then it would fail. Any low-level talking with other hardware may fail. Without a real-time kernel the interrupts will be very fuzzy by microcontroller standards. Talking to other low-level hardware with an arduino is easy. Not nearly as easy with a pi. Especially if the pi is doing a couple things.
I disagree with your reason why people don't program. The joy isn't just in running a program, but in creating it. If someone only enjoys running programs and not writing them then they probably won't make it as a programmer.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @06:25PM
Can we stop with fucking bullshit marketing buzzwords? It's becoming an epidemic. Stop.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @07:10PM
Ok, poked around this one a bit more. Mixed bag but generally good idea.
I suppose they just assumed that due to their yuge marketing muscle that this problem will get fixed but as of now this thing doesn't exactly make sense. If you want to use the hdmi port you probably want a user interface. (Although for signage you could just stuff the ad material on the boot microSD) So that either means a USB hub which blows the size and cost out of the water or you need a WiFi + BT dongle. None appear to be available with a microUSB OTG plug so you need an adapter bigger than the dongle. At any rate the dongle will cost more than the Pi0.
If you are doing microcontroller things with it you won't need the HDMI but the one USB port limit is probably something you will be running up against. Along with the only number for power consumption I have seen is 140ma@5v so while lower than the original Pi it still isn't in microcontroller territory by a long shot so except for robotics (already needs a big ass battery) that is a problem. Hope we get more details and find there are ways to better manage power consumption. For example the chip is basically a GPU with a CPU to feed it, if the GPU could be entirely powered down after boot it would probably help a lot since it draws more power.
Overall I am convinced the final iteration of the Pi need to just be a CPU + RAM and boot microSD on a carrier with an inexpensive edge connector to mate with carriers to break out various useful subsets of i/o for different markets. But ultimately the Pi is limited by the selection of an SoC with zero networking: No WiFi or Ethernet means most users have to pay an upcharge to get a network connection which at these prices will cost as much as the CPU itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:47PM
You mean like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module [raspberrypi.org]?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @08:16PM
No. It costs more in quan1 than the larger boards and they did a silly thing by replacing the microSD with a fixed 4GB flash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @09:59PM
Is the 4gb flash faster than a microSD?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @08:58PM
I tend to agree, its like they were going to make it an embedded device, but didnt fully understand what that means and blew it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @10:15PM
their yuge marketing muscle
OMG, he's been completely Trumped!
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @08:54PM
it may be 5 dollars, but its worthless without several extras to make it usable ( that both raise the cost and increase its footprint ). It would have been trivial for them to add current standard connectors and network connectivity for just a couple of bucks more.
Just because its 'the smallest and cheapest' does not make it valid selling point, or an engineering target.
(Score: 1) by Ayn Anonymous on Saturday November 28 2015, @10:24AM
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-arrival-Micro-Mini-5pin-USB-To-RJ45-10-100M-Ethernet-Network-Adapter-For-SamsungTable-PC/1611225179.html [aliexpress.com]
US $2.41
You can save another $0.30 if you buy from a lower rated vendor (not recommended).
Not the fastest, and probably not the right one for HD LAN streaming, but will do for Internet/WAN applications where the lan adapter will never be the bottle neck.