I’ve been meaning to post a link to this web site. These guys are developing a small embedded system running linux that will sell for $35, it looks really cool. There are some photos here.
While not directly related to robotics, it may be of interest to the programmers and hobbyists on the forum, it has some GPIO and serious graphics performance, the full spec is here.
So the Ras-Pi was released today in the UK, they are being sold through RS and Farnel but due to the incredible demand both sites were down due to traffic at launch. As it was late in Los Angeles (6am UK, 10pm LA), I could not get one on pre-order and the first batch has sold out
They sell arduino boards amongst many other things. The developers at CMU are porting ROBOTC to the arduino platform, you can see many references to this when looking through the ROBOTC headers, hopefully it will be released sometime this year.
I have been reading Magazines like EE Times, EDN and Electronic Design for all most 10 years now, and it is noticeable when Professional Publications for Engineers, mention Companies like Sparkfun catering to Hobbyist… And what it can mean for STEM Occupations…
Also, I will drop in a Plug for Embedded Systems Design from EE Times…
Get the Magazine, in PDF form for Mar-2012. A lot of what you read in there, can be applied to what you do here…
Good news, had an email from Newark allowing me to order my Ras-Pi I guess that is because Newark is the US version of Farnell and I have an account with Newark.
Bad news, will not ship until April 3
Edit: They gave a revised ship date this morning of May 18, oh well, summer project.
I just got my Notice from Newark @ 10:30 PST ( UTC -8 ) and I just put in my Initial Order… It appears that the Shipping and Handling are “free”, so $35.00 ( USD )… Also, my ship date is Expected to be 03-APR-2012… I wonder how long until I get a Revised Ship Date…
AFAIK, we’ve been embedding linux kernels into microcontrollers of all kinds for some time now - this seems to be the first with a presentable user-interface though.
I would imagine this having more office\work\general use applications opposed to gaming - and hey - anything with a decent C++ compiler is open game for me - as long as it supports the standard C++ libaries we find on other platforms ofcourse. It would be cool if they made a laptop version of this (not sure what the overhead on that would be, but I can imagine it being much cheaper than other computers on the market.)