I acknowledge this topic will only be of interest to a subset of this list.
Before I begin: does the Qi Hardware community find Mali graphics acceptable in terms of open-ness? That is one point that distinguishes the clutch of Allwinner A10/A13 designs from the BRCM based Rapberry Pi. MAIN TOPIC: This table from Adam Schemanoff compares technical specs for six recent ARM-based "mother boards." He missed the Beaglebone (cost is much lower than Beagleboard). http://adam.schemanoff.com/mini-computers.html Regardless of whether you find Raspberry Pi interesting or not, an ecosystem of support is emerging around it that reminds one of the Arduino. Considerable variety of inexpensive low-level (GPIO, I2C, SPI) i/o support is emerging. One works in Linux using scripting languages such as Python or even the clever visual language Scratch from MIT. Naturally C, Lua, assembler and most languages available on Linux are there. But the GPIO/I2C/SPI support is happening first in Python. Two examples (of many...) interesting hardware add-ons to Raspberry Pi: http://piface.openlx.org.uk/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/08/06/cpild-cpld-board-for-raspberry-pi/ As always, Google is your friend, but here's a couple of useful sites: http://www.raspihub.com/ http://reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi At $35 for the more expensive model (with Ethernet and 2xUSB) or $25 for Model A with a single USB and no Ethernet, I challenge you to find a complete, working Debian system that costs less or uses less power. When you get tired of it, gift it to a kid. That's the target audience in any case. Yes, some 200,000 have shipped, and the ongoing production rate is such that by early 2013 there should be in excess of a million units. Thinking up completely open hardware that uses RasPi as its mother-ship might be worth considering. At the CONSIDERABLE risk of making Sebastian upchuck, an OPTION where RasPi might be attached to the awesome Milkymist might not be a crazy idea. It can be a 900MHz user interface co-processor. One could plug a $4 Bluetooth congle in the RasPi USB slot and have Bluetooth keyboard and mouse or touchpad that can be used to control Milkymist during a VJ performance. One machine to machine interface (or several options) is Ehernet on MM to Ethernet on RasPi, speaking a protocol specific to MM. Ron K. Jeffries
_______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
