Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: > AFAIK the production board will have a number of (unbuffered) GPIO pins on a > header, so the hardware-inclined should be > able to use them.
That is great news! I could see lots of extra connectors on the alpha board, but had read somewhere that the plan was to remove all of those from the final product so users wouldn't be able to easily burn their boards by accident. I thought that was the whole point of a $25 machine, specially if sold to children who already have some level of access to a normal PC. > However, since debian is not primarily real-time oriented, it might be a bit > difficult to use these pins in the same way > as you would use an Arduino. Don't know whether a RT kernel with appropriate > drivers will be available. The R-PI has so > much more processing power than an Arduino that it should be able to perform > mostly the same functions in user level (on > a RT kernel, of course). Indeed, even with a non real time OS you can probably generate waveforms of a couple of MHz on a 600MHz ARM. It will be extremely sad if this turns out not to be the case since the whole reason for creating the ARM in the first place was that existing 16 bit processors didn't handle interrupts fast enough. > One of the nice things of the R-PI is that it is not tied to any specific > operating system, there are already efforts > under way to port RiscOS, and given enough determination, other OSes should > be doable as well. There was a nice report about RiscOS on this board from an event in London. The person doing the report wondered about this, pointing out that such an OS would exclude software like Scratch. Given that Tim kept the RiscOS port of the Squeak VM updated until version 3.8, it should be relatively easy to fix this. > Although this creates > some barrier for sharing software, it can stimulate experimentation, so > overall I think it's not bad. If the cost of having five different OSes is basically the cost of buying five SD cards, then it is a pretty small barrier compared to what we have had in the past. So I see this as a very good thing. > I'm seriously contemplating getting one - the unusual situation with this > geek toy is that I don't have to convince my > wife that it's not too expensive (nobody can argue against a $25 or $35 proce > tag) but that I won't spend day and night > with this thing after the package arrives :-) The only negative thing in the whole project is that the chip choice was based on a relationship that the creator has but the users don't (being employed by Broadcom, in this case, and being funded by AMD in the OLPC case). This tends to cause conflict when people end up leaking information they were not supposed to, or to cause conflict when nobody leaks the needed information. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
