The broadcom chip on there is of the kind that is in your iphone and
other smartphones. They are SoC's (system-on-a-chip), meaning all
peripherals are on the chip. If you look at the board you will see that
there is almost no other glue, than just what is needed to go to the
various connectors.
The iphone and android success and the competition between them has made
these chips really, really cheap. Also, the raspi foundation is a
charity organization that intends to bring kids back to the commodore 64
spirit, and it does not care much for much margin.
In fact, where you say that the Ni-H system can be controlled by
something similar, you are spot on: the fusioncatalyst.org open source
initiative that Bastiaan announced will use the beaglebone, which is a
very similar device, and uses the same ARM CPU core. It is here on my
desk, has tons of I/O pins and works great. The raspi is just a bit
short on I/O pins, but, who knows. I intend to buy some of them anyway :-)
Andre
On 02/29/2012 02:43 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
Yikes - this is not OT at all. How can they do it for the price? This could
kill a big chunk of the Pic and Arduino market for microcontrollers, with a
few changes.
Don't be surprised if your new Ni-H system is controlled by something
similar.
-----Original Message-----
From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson
This might be of interest to some here as well!
Tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer causes big stir on launch day
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/29/tech/raspberry-pi-launch/index.html?hpt=hp_bn6
Excerpt:
(CNN) -- The tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer went on sale today, crashing
its distributors' websites on the way to selling out within hours of launch.
