>> OK. Again, that's not nearly as much as I thought. Makes me wonder why

>> makes it a high-colour touch-screen device...
>


Actually, the Raspberry Pi is kind of interesting...



When I first heard about it, it was billed as the BBC Micro for the 21st 
century. It's supposed to be a disposable-priced computer that will get 
kids interested in computer programming.

...expect that you can realistically write bare-metal code for an 8-bit 
PC with nothing more than a list of I/O register memory addresses and a 
weak knowledge of binary. I actually did this as a 10 year old child on 
my dad's Commodore 64. I wrote a tiny machine code program with pencil 
and paper. (We couldn't afford an assembler program, but I had an opcode 
table, and no friends or social life.)

By stark contrast, you can't do that on a Raspberry Pi. I mean, you 
*literally* can't do that; the hardware specs for the GPU are propriety. 
You can only look at them if you sign an NDA. Even Raspbian has to use a 
closed-source binary blob to drive the video hardware. If the Linux 
gurus of the Internet can't do this stuff, a kid has *no* chance! :-P

Yeah, it's kinda cool that you have this little circuit board that's 
super-easy to hook up to your computer, and to control other stuff with. 
But are kids really going to be that interested? Probably not.



Having looked around, it appears that the Raspberry Pi has actually 
spawned an entire new market sector of imitators. There is now the 
Orange Pi and the Banana Pi. (No, I'm not making this up!) Both made by 
companies completely unrelated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. There's 
the utterly unpronounceable Arduino. There's the BeagleBoard and 
BeagleBone. Indeed, it seems that single-board computers are a "thing" 
now. Everybody wants a piece of the pie!

The specifications of some of these devices look amazing! For example, 
while the most powerful Raspberry Pi system has a single-core 700MHz CPU 
and 0.5GB of RAM, the Banana Pi has a dual-core 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. 
And the Orange Pi has a quad-core 1.6GHz CPU!

...and then you look at the price tag. And you realise why. The original 
Raspberry Pi might have been designed to be a low-cost, disposable 
component, but some of the more powerful boards are priced at *hundreds* 
of dollars. You could buy an *actual* computer for that! (Although it 
would be way bigger, obviously.) Just because it's a naked circuit board 
with no case, doesn't automatically mean it's cheap. ;-)



Due to my boss existing, I've started reading Hackaday. I was amused the 
other day to see that somebody is trying to build an open-source mobile 
phone out of a Raspberry Pi. So... you're taking a SoC originally 
designed for the mobile phone industry, and trying to make a mobile 
phone out of it? What a rebel. LOL!

Still, the other day I found myself vaguely toying with the idea of 
getting a small tablet, just so I can sit in the corner coding when 
we're in a deserted forest or something. But why bother paying several 
hundred pounds for a tablet if you can actually buy a Raspberry Pi and a 
touchscreen for less than the cost of a pub meal?

Mind you... I've yet to actually *see* a Raspberry Pi on sale anywhere 
for the reputed price of $15. :-P For example, Maplin want to charge you 


(Oh, I'm sure the packet contains way more than just the circuit board. 
But that's the only bit I actually *want*...)

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