I learned a lot about programming (and soldering) from these early days and later forays into such wonderful objects as the Commodore PET, Apple][ and, of course, the BBC B I cut my teeth on hardware and software engineering. How I wished that these opportunities to do the same existed for my children, especially in our consumer-led, 'works out of the box' existence.
Well someone must have heard my cries for we have been blessed with a wonderful opportunity to return to the breadboard computing days with a superb project from a 'non for profit group', the Raspberry Pi foundation, by the name of the 'Raspberry Pi - Model B'.
The spec's for which (for those interested parties) are:
- Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
- GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 256MB RAM
- Boots from an SD card (Fedora version of Linux)
- 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
- HDMI socket
- USB 2.0 socket
- RCA video socket
- SD card socket
- Powered from microUSB socket
- 3.5mm audio out jack
- Header footprint for camera connection
- 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm
And costs less than £25!
So, if you have children (or are even a bit interested in computing at the grassroots level - this is the toy for them (and you).
Now - what can I do with it to justify using them in church (which has to be done - doesn't it?), after all it can do everything the big boys do, once you've made it do it of course - and that's the attraction (or perhaps not for those who are happy to be consumers!
First there was
And now, thinking of Windoze I can offer a heartfelt
:-)
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