Raspberry pi looks like a pretty good contendor against arduino

[shims506]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Some of the people at my local Hacker Space has brought this up on a forum and looks promising. The device is capable of blu-ray play back 1080p and is affordable at a price tag of $25. The product is still in testing phase and proto-boards may be bought on ebay (close to around 800+ euro which all goes to help fund their project).

Anyone think this may kill the arduino?

[PeterG]

It 1200+UKPounds, i dont think Arduino is in any real danger with its $30-$50AUD boards.

Regards

[shims506]

It 1200+UKPounds, i dont think Arduino is in any real danger with its $30-$50AUD boards.

Regards

Those are the beta boards and it was up to the company to put such a hight price, enthusiast and followers bid to that price which to me is shocking.

Once testing is done they announced a $25 price tag on it.

[joelby]

The proceeds from the auctions are being used for charitable purposes - hence the high prices. There was an article today about how one was bought for the purposes of donating it to a computer museum.

At the $25 target price, I can think of little reason to use an Arduino for anything! An Arduino WiFi shield is, what, $40+? With Linux you can use a <$10 USB WiFi dongle, and rapidly develop interfaces in Apache and PHP or whichever stack takes your fancy.

[8086]

I see it being used for ethernet applications instead of arduino, for example. But for general tinkering or if you are a beginner etc. Arduino is still going to be the go-to board.

[PeterG]

I see it being used for ethernet applications instead of arduino, for example. But for general tinkering or if you are a beginner etc. Arduino is still going to be the go-to board.

Yes, i see Rapberry Pi as being a good Hi Performance option. There Arduino is a good general use board.

Regards

[amspire]

I am really looking forward to getting hold of a $25 Raspberry Pi board, but it is not a replacement for Arduino - it is more of a compliment. Arduino can do networking, but it is really pushing its capabilities. On the other hand the Arduino is perfect for simple control and 16x2 LCD display type work. The Arduino can run on a surface mount or through hole processor, and you can move an Arduino project from the Arduino board to a custom project at just the cost of a $3 IC and a few other very cheap parts.

Raspberry Pi on the other hand would be a nightmare to implement on a custom PCB, and the costs would probably be more than $25, since the $25 is subsidized. They are probably getting the best possible pricing from the chip suppliers.

The Arduino processors run off microamps if you slow the clock down far enough, so it can be fabulous for battery low-powered applications.

To have both options will be absolutely great.

Richard.

[IanB]

I never thought of Raspberry Pi competing with Arduino. One is a low cost computer, the other is a microcontroller experimentation platform. Is the Raspberry Pi going to have a whole variety of hardware interfaces and a friendly dev environment to access them?

[8086]

I think it's sufficient to put it this way:

Raspberry Pi is mostly about software

Arduino is mostly about hardware

They don't really meet at all.

[Psi]

I'm sure you can flash an LED with your 700Mhz ARM cpu if you really want to

[joelby]

Is the Raspberry Pi going to have a whole variety of hardware interfaces and a friendly dev environment to access them?

Hardware remains to be seen, but there's no reason why a 'shield' ecosystem won't emerge.

For software development.. you can run vi on it! What more could you want? It will run all of the 'normal' development tools natively, or you could cross-compile from a PC.

I agree that for cheap applications, being able to move from an Arduino prototype to a bare MCU is great, but for anything that has to be Internet connected, or deal with more advanced sensors such as cameras, you might as well use Linux and everything that comes with it when it costs so little.

[8086]

I'm sure you can flash an LED with your 700Mhz ARM cpu if you really want to

Oh sure, in fact that's the first thing I did with my IGEPv2 board:

But it's oh so pointless. 

[ejeffrey]

As near as I can tell there is no ADC, no PWM, and it won't ship with I2C or SPI drivers.  IO is 3.3 volt only, and there are only 8 GPIO.  It also consumes a fair bit more power than the arduino, which may be an issue for some people.

It looks quite promising, but it isn't exactly an arduino replacement for easy hardware hacking, at least not yet. 

Edit: 8 GPIO is a lie.  Just like arduino, the other peripheral ports can be reconfigured as GPIO, so there are more like 17 available pins.

[joelby]

There are Linux drivers for I2C and SPI, but it would take a tiny bit of hacking to get them working with a new board. I'm sure it won't take very long.

[westfw]

I'm sure you can flash an LED with your 700Mhz ARM cpu if you really want to

Sure.  You just download the LED loadable kernel driver.  Which will of course require a new version of the extended precision math and multilingual 3d gui button libraries before you can compile it.  But that'll need a new version of the C compiler that isn't compatible with the core ARM support, so you ....

(come to think of it, updating Arduino past gcc 4.3 isn't looking like such a walk in the park, either.)

[firewalker]

There is no "threat" for Arduino from Rpi and vice versa. It's potatoes and tomatoes.

Off topic. I am really hopping for an XBMC version to be available with the release date of Rpi.

Alexander.

[PeterG]

If they can get XBMC working on this, then i would be interested....... it would make a nice little media box.

Regards

[firewalker]

Actually I had read it in Wikipedia.

Raspberry Pi community forum administrators have mentioned that XBMC developers are also in development of a port of XBMC media center software to Broadcom BCM2835 SoC based devices using the Raspberry Pi board as its reference platform.

Alexander.

[benemorius]

I'm sure you can flash an LED with your 700Mhz ARM cpu if you really want to

Not in real time you can't.

[firewalker]

If they can get XBMC working on this, then i would be interested....... it would make a nice little media box.

Regards

Alexander.

[steff]

I think it's sufficient to put it this way:

Raspberry Pi is mostly about software

Arduino is mostly about hardware

They don't really meet at all.

Have a look at the Gertboard. I can easily see the RPi taking off for hardware projects that require a bit of floating-point oomph (I'm looking forward to seeing what people get up to with them in the homebrew UAV/autopilot world, for instance - not having to count cycles in your Kalman filter has to be a big help in ease of implementation).

Obviously, it's no replacement for Arduino as a means of prototyping things that will later just a bare AVR and the minimum of external components though.

[8086]

I think it's sufficient to put it this way:

Raspberry Pi is mostly about software

Arduino is mostly about hardware

They don't really meet at all.

Have a look at the Gertboard. I can easily see the RPi taking off for hardware projects that require a bit of floating-point oomph (I'm looking forward to seeing what people get up to with them in the homebrew UAV/autopilot world, for instance - not having to count cycles in your Kalman filter has to be a big help in ease of implementation).

Exactly. These are projects that need lots of processing in software. The RPi has I/O just like Arduino, but it uses unfriendly voltages, so requires extra hardware to interface to normal hobbyist stuff, etc. And of course Arduino is simpler to use, much lower power, doesnt have any need to 'boot', etc. So for simple hardware projects, Arduino wins. For processing, RPi wins.

[MarkS]

It looks good and I'll be getting one. I am curious how they got around HDMI licensing issues?

[Psi]

It looks good and I'll be getting one. I am curious how they got around HDMI licensing issues?

Do you mean HDCP?
I doubt it implements HDCP at all. Being open source i don't see how they could.

Remember HDMI is just DVI with a SPDIF sound channel and standard timing for 720p/1080p and other TV related resolutions.
It does have optional HDContentProtecton but you don't have to use it unless your playing protected content.

[MarkS]

It looks good and I'll be getting one. I am curious how they got around HDMI licensing issues?

Do you mean HDCP?
I doubt it implements HDCP at all. Being open source i don't see how they could.

Nope.

http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/terms.aspx