Click pictures to enlarge
This is not a post about the kind of raspberry pie you make from your garden, but rather a computer with almost the same name.
I come from an information technology background, with particular emphasis on open source software. One of the important things IT and plant breeding/seed saving have in common, is you don’t need to go to school for a degree in order to learn them. The other important thing is many of the same battles are being fought over intellectual property rights and freedom to use and share.
I often think if the two worlds of seed saving and free software could unite forces, we’d be much stronger fighting our battles together. Right to food and right to information technology are not as unrelated as you might think.
In that spirit, I thought I’d write a bit about this new computer, the Raspberry Pi. In March orders were hitting 700 per second. Now demand has come down, production is up and they are in stock again. There’s no longer a restriction on the number one person can buy.
It currently costs about US$35, and it comes without a case like the above picture. It’s very small, as you can see comparing it to the pen. In my case, I splurged almost more than I care to admit for the plastic case you see below. I actually spent more money on the case than the original computer itself…
The case is really nice. I don’t remember the name of the company, but it was an amazon.co.uk reseller, and the expensive part was having it shipped to me here in Amsterdam. There are loads of cases available on ebay, but most of those also involve shipping costs from the UK.
If you want to save money on the case, you can always print out you own, with the help of this pdf file.
Not only does it come without a case, but there’s no power supply, operating system, keyboard, mouse, monitor, memory or hard disk.
Okay, so why can such a small computer that comes without a case be so interesting?
Well if you go to a store a buy a similar configuration, you can easily spend ten times as much. But beyond the cost of the computer itself, many of these missing items I listed above can be found at little or no cost, often from old discarded computer parts. Remember the one laptop per child/$100 laptop programs? Many comparisons can be made with this. The important thing about the Raspberry Pi is it’s available now, and anyone anywhere in the world can buy one.
It’s always been a bit of an issue that while computers tend to get cheaper over time, we get pushed up to more expensive models because manufacturers discontinue the less profitable ones. The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to address this problem, and make a cheap computer available.
The speed of this computer is not spectacular, but it has a very high performance graphics processor. I can imagine future versions will probably be faster, and in any case if you’re used to the Linux operating system, the performance for normal Internet surfing, emailing, downloading and so on is very acceptable.
The computer is being manufactured by a UK charity. I don’t think all the individual parts are necessarily locally sourced, but it’s assembled in the UK.
The computer is powered by a standard micro-USB connector, the identical connector used on many mobile phones and other small electronics now. It is technically possible to power it off a USB port from another computer, but the designers say you shouldn’t do this. It happily runs off a powered USB hub, that can also increase the number of attached USB devices. Needless to say, if you have a smart phone, you probably already own a suitable power supply for this computer. The designers say it should run quite happily off 4 AA batteries fitted with a voltage regulator, and for example it should be very easy to power it off a solar panel. If you’re like me and like to leave your computer on sometimes, if you are sensible about what you connect to it and run, it shouldn’t take much more power than a mobile phone.
It takes a standard USB keyboard and mouse. It has a composite video and audio out, and so it’s possible to connect it to many old TVs or monitors. In Europe we have a scart connection on older TVs, and a cheap adaptor is available to connect it to a scart. It also has an HDMI (digital video) connector for modern computer monitors and TVs. It does not have a VGA connector! The designers said this would have been a technical hurdle, and added considerably to the expense. There are HDMI to VGA converters, but these are quite pricey. There’s no reason you can’t use a touch screen (then you don’t need a keyboard or mouse, and the screen can potentially be powered off the Raspberry Pi itself via the USB), but those are still a little pricey too.
What kept me from using the Raspberry Pi the day it arrived, was the HDMI monitor connection. Many computers a few years old like mine, have a digital video port (DVI or DV, I think), with a cable that connects to a HDMI monitor. The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI port, and so you need an HDMI to HDMI cable. This is pretty common and inexpensive, but many people might not have it lying around their house.
It comes with a jack for a standard wired Internet connection, but should support wireless network via USB (at the expense of some power drain).
The standard OS is Linux, but I understand Android has been ported to it, or at least is being worked on. Since the architecture is open, it’s quite likely more software will be ported to it. The computer is booted off a standard SD card, and depending on the OS and size of the card, there may be extra space on the card for storage. Otherwise, you can use a USB key or other external disk.
Have I convinced you yet?
If there are other Raspberry Pi users out there, I’d love to hear from you!
