OT-ish, pic/amtel programmer and software suggestions

[dennis]

It will be even better when windows runs on it.

[Adam Aglionby]

That should occupy the first hour ;-)

Additional hardware is likely to be virtually nothing, 328 is onboard everything:

how minimalist it can get.

Reality is now ,that its cheaper to use an Uno as is for one off projects, if you need additional hardware, dedicate a proto shield to it:

and i should have a custom board that interfaces the lcd to the usb port = on

LCD Smartie runs the newsticker on my office computer , its quite clever.

328 with bootloader is around a fiver , whole Uno board is around a tenner...

Guess the Chinese will probably start offering bulk deals on Uno and Mini`s by the dozen, they are that useful.

Arduino Mega is next processor up, lot of I/O available but same enviroment.

Probably get some fragments of code from flight simulator crew:

[John Williamson]

As it uses an ARM processor, that *might* be possible if MS can be @rsed porting Windows 8 to the architecture. Or you could always have a try...

[dennis]

M$ are porting to arm.

[Tim Watts]

Manufacturing has started, according to their blog:

with min-rant about having to go abroad because Britain is too expensive and/or slow!

Glad they've started with the Model B's (the one with ethernet+HDMI).

Only 256MB RAM - I *suspect* these will not ship with an SD card, so should be able to shove a decently fast/robust one in and allocate some swap...

I've already found a nice Xenta powered USB 10 port wall-mountable hub for a tenner which should both power it and act as a rendezvous point for all the crap like keyboards, mice, WIFI dongle...

I plan to screw that and the Pi to the side of the desk in all its glory :)

[Tim Watts]

*Never* being possible to run Windows seems like a plus to me.

If this thing really can run Debian convincingly[1] with a browser, I cannot wait for the school to ask the kids about what they use at home, computer wise...

[1] It appears to boot Debian convincingly in the video on their site. As I mentioned, it's RAM challenged, so we'll have to see how it copes with some real world apps like a browser and LibreOffice with swap.

Of course, network swap is another possibility... That's already been researched for fun by someone at Imperial many years ago, and proven benefical when local disks were crap and slow. Might have to drop in a real ethernet cable for that to be a good idea though...

Anyway, for the money, I'm buying one as soon as it's out (few weeks hopefully). Will happily report back.

Cheers,

Tim

[Andy Burns]

[rapberry pi]

Which is already in the pipeline

The OLPC project seemed to run into the mud shortly after MS persuaded them to make Windows an option ...

[Tim Streater]

Oh shit - is there no way for us to be free of effing Windows?

[Huge]

Why would anyone bother porting that bloated crapware?

[Huge]

Quelle surprise.

[dennis]

I have run unix machines without disks with only 256M of RAM in the past. (The BT network has thousands of them.) They have swap as well as / over NFS using 10M ethernet (it could have been upgraded by now).

I probably will too, but I could put a full OS on my spare linkstation instead. I think that is arm based so the whole repository will be ported now the pi is about.

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are - you can buy 8 prototypes on ebay for >$1000 each :(