Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. - <AUTHOR> http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-news/press-releases/2012/10/disney-acquire-lucasfilm-ltd <comment><USER2> This means that Disney now controls Marvel, Pixar, LucasArts, ABC, ESPN, A+E, Disney Channel plus all their own original content and of course the parks and merchandising rights for everything stated above. Those businesses most likely control the top 10 film franchises of the last few years. This is a pretty insane acquisition.

<comment><USER3> Therefore, it should be noted that they directly, or via tacit gatekeeping, have a huge amount of influence on our public dialog and cultural messaging.

<comment><USER4> Marvel, Pixar, LucasArts, ABC, ESPN, A+E, Disney Channel, and associated merchandising. I'm not sure how much "control" over our "public dialog" this really implies. I'm the parent of two very normal middle aged children and, while they're certainly exposed to some of this IP, I'd contest that it has much "influence" over them.

Google has much more control over our public dialog than Disney does.

<comment><USER5> I was personally deeply shocked recently, when I sat with my children as they were watching the animated Iron Man series at their grandpas house. This was on Sunday morning TV. The episode was about other 'bad' characters stealing Iron Mans suit. I was alarmed when the dialog turned explicitly to talk of Patents and how evil it was that they were infringing Iron Mans designs. As I continued to watch it dawned on me that the whole episode was just one big propaganda piece.

Disneys dialog is present, right beneath our noses.

Best link to relevant episode: <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor_Wars#section_5>

<comment><USER4> Two responses.

(i) Millions of kids saw that episode and went on to pirate movies and music anyways, because kids don't really derive their ethics from cartoon series, just like you & I aren't secretly animated by "Knowing is Half The Battle" from G.I. Joe. (<http://www.joeheadquarters.com/joeendings.shtml>)

(ii) The particular message you're suggesting Iron Man is "propagandizing" is so anodyne that it was the subject of a whole episode of _Arthur_ on PBS.

<comment><USER6> > Millions of kids saw that episode and went on to pirate movies and music > anyways, because kids don't really derive their ethics from cartoon series

The point of such propaganda would not be to ensure that people don't pirate, but to plant the idea that doing so is morally bad, so that lobbying efforts in favor of IP protection laws seem morally legitimate.

<comment><USER4> Then the evil forces of Disney are in league with PBS to deliver that message.

<comment><USER7> "It's cool guys, Arthur supports IP too."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disney paid $4B for Lucasfilm.

Six years ago, they paid $7B for Pixar.[1]

Pixar used to be a subsidiary of Lucasfilm.

This means that John Lasseter is now going to have control of all of the assets that allowed him to get into making movies in the first place.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Acquisition_by_Disney>

<comment><USER9> Let's not forget they paid that 7 billion in 2006. I can almost see this as Disney trying to replace the eye for talent and negotiating power they lost in Steve Jobs' passing, along with an amazing IP acquisition.

Edit: Thought of better terms than "creative force".

<comment><USER10> Steve Jobs wasn't ever really a "creative force" at Disney.

<comment><USER11> So true, but somehow a lot of people don't know it. He was just a facilitator at Pixar. A _damn good facilitator_ , one who made it all happen, but still he wasn't Pixar's visionary (like he was Apple's). Lasseter deserves all the credit for that part.

<comment><USER12> Actually you're wrong on that part. Steve was the visionary.

He was the one who saw Pixar as being a brand (i.e. a modern day Disney) rather than just an anonymous studio. Kids are buying and trusting the Pixar brand not the Disney brand. So to be able to set that all up (e.g. equal billing) required a vision for what the company could be.

Steve was responsible for Pixar. John was responsible for Pixar's movies.

<comment><USER13> Um, didn't the real history go slightly differently?

Steve Jobs invested in Pixar because of the _hardware_. When that didn't fly, the shorts and commercials being done by Lasseter (that paid the bills) turned into a gamble to make a full-length movie. This whole "branding" thing didn't come until the first movie was a success.

<comment><USER14> I would suggest that visionary is never having the prediction of exactly how it will turn out but having the faith that this is the right direction and the details will resolve in time

<comment><USER15> You make "visionary" sound equivalent to "simpleton".

<comment><USER16> The difference between visionary and simpleton is the scale of money involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it > was important to set up the transition during my lifetime._

This is effectively Lucas' slow decent into retirement; he's not actively directing Episode 7 but instead consulting. Say what you want about the movies and franchises, ILM and Skywalker Sound are gold standards created by a tech visionary.

<comment><USER18> I hope they are doing the Thrawn trilogy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrawn_trilogy>

<comment><USER19> My thoughts exactly when hearing of the news, but I doubt it'd actually happen :( They'd probably have to get rights from Zahns publisher or Dark Horse or whomever owns it, I'd think. I don't think this purchase counts as an umbrella IP grab for all offshoots too?

<comment><USER20> If they can afford Lucasfilm, they can surely afford to license Zahn's books. (Assuming Lucasfilm didn't already have the right to film them, which they might, if they thought to insert the right language into the book contracts.)

Whether they want to is another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Star Wars Episode 7 will come out in 2015. They also acquired all of the assets including Indiana Jones, Star Wars, ILM, LucasArts and Skywalker Sound

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm no media/film expert, but this sounds like a great acquisition for Disney. The current library/brands and Disney's distribution can squeeze any cash left from past movies/brands. Going forward this can be a true money-printing machine. Lets just hope they acknowledge the internet is the retail distribution channel of today.

Also, funny how life works. Pixar, a spin-off of Lucasfilm back in the 90's "acquires" Lucasfilm. Am I right in saying that Disney's movie division is headed/managed by the Pixar guys?

<comment><USER21> What about a Pixar animated Star Wars movie?

<comment><USER22> 1\. Get off my lawn

2\. Die in a Fire

<comment><USER21> _> 1\. Get off my lawn_

Hey that's my line. I've been coding for 32 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those fretting the future, it will be hard for Disney to fuck up the franchise more than Lucas did with _The Phantom Menace._

[http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars- episo...](http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars- episode-1-the-phantom-menace/)

<comment><USER24> Hope they chose an awesome director for episode 7: [http://www.businessinsider.com/five-directors-disney- should-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/five-directors-disney-should-ask- to-make-star-wars-episode-7-2012-10)

<comment><USER25> That's a great list. Although I think that Brad Bird would be a natural choice as well.

<comment><USER26> Brad Bird would be amazing. He did great with MI4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This now means that Princess Leia is a Disney Princess.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe now we'll see a BluRay version of ANH where Han shoots first...

<comment><USER29> That brings up a good point. Die-hard Star Wars fans have been begging Lucasfilm to release the "unspecial" editions of the original trilogy for many years. IIRC Lucasfilm claims the original negatives were permanently altered when the special editions were made...but certainly no editor could be so careless? It's possible the original negatives still exist and Disney will eventually release them.

Further watching: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1325014/>

<comment><USER30> If nothing else there are still high-quality laserdisc copies of the original; I believe there's a DVD-quality rip therof on the internets.

<comment><USER31> LFL released the original-unaltered-trilogy in 2006 as bonus DVDs to stand alongside the 2004 releases of the Special Editions. They used the D1 Maser Tapes created for the 1993 Definitive Collection laserdisc set, so they're (technically) better than the aforementioned laserdiscs.

With that being said, the image quality suffers from horrible smearing caused by 1993-era DVNR and colors are severely desaturated. Furthermore, the release was rushed and reeks of an inexperienced restoration team. For more information, see: <http://savestarwars.com/gout.html>

It is held by many to be the worst DVD release of all time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> $4 Billion and it's 100% owned by George Lucas.

Does anyone know if that 100% is literal? That he didn't give away ANYTHING, even for a pool for employees?

<comment><USER33> The 100% ownership is literal. From the press release: "The agreement has been approved by the sole shareholder of Lucasfilm."

<comment><USER33> I suppose that, in theory, he could have given away non-voting shares to some of his employees over time. But then I would have expected the press release to specify that he was the sole voting shareholder, rather than "the sole shareholder."

<comment><USER34> I don't really know much about the movie business, but my understanding is that new companies are incorporated for each individual movie project. The investors (of cash, franchise IP, or time) receive shares in _that movie's_ corporation. Presumably the profits are then paid out as dividends, or the company is dissolved, and assets are distributed. That would explain why George Lucas never suffered any dilution on Lucasfilm, which presumably is just a shell whose main purpose is ownership of the various franchises and holding shares in the various sub-companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow, didn't see it coming, but this old comic comes to mind:

[http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/The-Final-Merger-New- Yorke...](http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/The-Final-Merger-New-Yorker- Cartoon-Prints_i8479117_.htm)

On the scripting-side, this should create one of the bigger if not biggest Python house(s). Disney was converting to it when I left (many years ago) and ILM is a known proponent... their whole pipeline from front to back is accessible from it.

Episode 7? First I've heard of it. _crosses fingers_.

</comment><comment><USER36> It means they bought LucasArts too. Not that LucasArts were great in the last decade or so but Disney sucks as a "parent" for game dev companies (RIP Blackrock).

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, a pixar-enhanced reboot of DOTT ... now you're talking ...

<comment><USER25> Or Grim-Fandango HD for iOS. A man can dream, right?

<comment><USER37> Look what I just read: [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/pixar-d%C3%AD...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/pixar-d%C3%ADa- de-los-muertos-film.html)

Grim Fandango the movie, anyone?

<comment><USER25> That is so cool. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Three words that scare me: "Disney's Star Wars"

(for context, note that they've been explicitly tagging their name on all their kids fare, especially stuff based on public domain or historical sources)

<comment><USER39> Like with "Disney's The Avengers"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wonder if they'll get a seasoned director for Star Wars 7, or if they'll go with a controllable newcomer like Sony did with Amazing Spider Man.

<comment><USER41> As much as the idea of Ep. 7 pains me, I wouldn't mind seeing Brad Bird direct it. He took another classic franchise that I had grown to hate (Mission: Impossible), and made it fun again. He also has close ties to Disney/Pixar.

<comment><USER42> I thought M:I Ghost Protocol was pretty mediocre. To each his own.

<comment><USER25> M:I Ghost Protocol was probably the most cartoonish thing that Brad Bird has done. I recently re-watched The Incredibles and... yeah, I can totally see him making a redemptive Episode VII.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> George lucas sells Pixar to Jobs. He sells it to Disney and becomes largest single shareholder. Jobs fam now owns a part of Lucasfilm. Crazy.

</comment><comment><USER44> When to cash-out, a Jedi knows.

</comment><comment><USER45> Robot Chicken was right. We ARE going to get Star Wars Musicals. Oh Dear.

<comment><USER46> Already happened in Japan.

<comment><USER45> Where/when ? I'd be curious to see something about that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> All I wanna know is whether or not Lucas signed first.

</comment><comment><USER48> I want a remake of the first three episodes.

They were a shame for fans. The best one was "the empire strikes back" and it was not directed by George Lucas.

</comment><comment><USER49> Perhaps now, Han can go back to shooting first?

</comment><comment><USER50> It's hard to understand body language without knowing the person well but on all pictures I've seen it looks like Lucas's left hand is trying to stop his right hand from signing the contract. It would seem he might have been hesitant about the deal.

</comment><comment><USER51> All I want to know is if this means the possibility of a Tie Fighter remake from LucasArts.

</comment><comment><USER52> A Donald and Howard buddy flick can now be finally realized. Well worth four billion ducks.

</comment><comment><USER53> ...for the price of 4 Instagrams.

</comment><comment><USER54> Makes good sense to me. Who knows more about milking overstretched and outdated IP?

</comment><comment><USER55> This must have something to do with the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'd be happy if Disney released LucasArts games on some distribution platform. Being able to own those games without having to resort to torrents would be great.

</comment><comment><USER57> Monopoly & Anti-Trust concerns, anyone?

<comment><USER58> If it were some other industry other than movies I would be concerned. Disney is building themselves up to be a competitor to Universal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Jar Jar Binks and Donald Duck. How fitting.

<comment><USER60> How is this fitting? Donald Duck is a great character. Duck comics still go strong over here in Europe.

<comment><USER61> How about Howard the Duck? How did he do in Europe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Wonder if this might have any effect on Google/Motorola's licensing of the Droid trademark from Lucasfilm?

</comment><comment><USER63> I have a bad feeling about this.

</comment><comment><USER58> Awesome! Finally a way to mash my two favorite things, musical numbers and Star Wars!

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow, flannel George..really? I hope he's wearing flip-flops, too ;)

</comment><comment><USER65> Awesome, Episode 7. Think I might watch 5 and 6 again soon.

<comment><USER66> I think the point is that Disney will be behind the movies now. As a fan, I am more in fear of horrible, time wasting movies, Disney is known for making sequels to just try and make some extra money out of a series. Star Wars is a jackpot for that. While some more honorable fans will not see the movies, most fans will regardless because they have to at least see the new movies otherwise they wouldn't be fans anymore.

<comment><USER65> I'm hopeful that through Disney the series will get an awesome reboot. Look how good the Marvel Comics movies have been since the Disney acquisition in 2009.

(Iron Man 2, Captain America, The Avengers all awesome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Are they really going to be making other star wars movies?

</comment><comment><USER68> hope they don't lead STAR WARS the 'JOHN CARTER ' way. Let John Lasseter and the rest of PIXAR team handle LUCASFILMS

</comment><comment><USER69> Rise of the Planet of the Binks

</comment><comment><USER70> Wow, got gooseflesh on reading this news.

</comment><comment><USER71> Monopoly?

</comment><comment><USER72> Jar Jar Disney Christmas

<comment><USER73> Hey, it's happened before.

<http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/star-wars-holiday-special>

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I would of thought more people on this planet know more about star wars than they do facebook. Yet Facebook valued at 100bn (initialy) and Lucasfilm valued at 4bn and like many people the response was thats low.

Lets look at it another way - do a google search for star wars and then facebook and notice the number of results:

star wars: About 420,000,000 results (0.21 seconds)

facebook: About 20,570,000,000 results (0.17 seconds)

Now if you get (100/fb results)* star wars results you get a value of around 2

So with that you could say if facebook was overvalued at twice its value then you can say that lucasfilm is worth 4bn, or at least argue that as a price.

Personaly I would of thought that had Lucasfilm ran a share sale, then the value would of been alot more, just from fans collecting a share certificate for there star wars collection alone. Now they can own a Disney share and feel all dirty I suppose somehow.

Either way when you sell a company directly, I tend to see low ball prices in consumer valuations of the company. Now if you sell it as shares or are flavour of the month and can get silly offers, the prices seems to be over consumer valuations. Though even after this news, the share price has not changed much and still values Disney at around 90bn.

<comment><USER75> Since when does popularity substantially determine share valuation?

<comment><USER74> Supply and demand and fashion have there cross overs. RIM share price has certainly been influenced by public opinion, depite some good sales/figures at times that counter the drops. Self forfilling prophecy that one.

Facebook being another classic, share price based more upon popularity. New startups all the time get snapped up on initial fashion popularity. Nothing is clear cut, should be but it is not. If some stars suddendly endorse a product does it make the product better, may help sales may not but the share price will rise before those sales based upon expectations. So in many ways popularity be it directly or indirectly effects all share price valuations, markets are so volatile by being so twitch dynamicly fast that it is more a direct factor upon share price than it was in years past.</comment></comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/ <comment><USER3> This is seriously impressive.

While the Raspberry Pi is not the perfect hacker-friendly computer, it has done a lot of good. Some reasons off the top of my head:

1\. Providing a low cost computer has given many people access to computers. Giving more people access to the web, email, an office suit, a programming environment AND giving people the ability of safely tinker without the fear of bricking an expensive device.

2\. Introduced many different types of people to the FOSS landscape of powerful tools (e.g. distros such as Debian, tools such as Python).

3\. The Raspberry Pi foundation has paid developers to write/optimise FOSS (e.g. paid Collabora to optimise WebkitGTK+ -- I think some Wayland work was also done).

4\. Built on top of _existing_ FOSS tools (e.g. building Raspbian on top of Debian), instead of doing everything on their own in a proprietary fashion. This has no doubt also helped to introduce new people into these communities.

This is a really good counter-point to all the "locked down" (hacker unfriendly) devices like smart phones and tablets.

<comment><USER4> This is probably the result of boards like the $9 C.H.I.P. stealing their thunder a little. (Which should actually be able to run Debian, unlike the Pi - Debian Jessie has built-in support for that generation of Allwinner chips.) The Pi has not actually been all that cheap lately compared to the competition. There's no reason they couldn't have done this years ago; like that Allwinner chip, the BCM2835 is an old, slow processor whose R&D costs were probably paid back long ago that they wouldn't otherwise be able to sell. This is especially true of the BCM2835, which is an ARM11 chip that's not widely supported outside the RPi ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> This could even act as a custom chromecast-ish device. Still cheaper too!

(Although it lacks WiFi AC that the new chromecast has, and probably way weaker graphics, but a cheap WiFi adapter or ethernet and having most stuff streamed should be workable.)

<comment><USER6> > (Although it lacks WiFi AC that the new chromecast has, and probably way > weaker graphics, but a cheap WiFi adapter or ethernet and having most stuff > streamed should be workable.)

This irks me a bit with the new "$5" RPi. Yes, it's $5… For a device without a power cord, without networking, and where you need adapters (and/or solder on a UART) to plug anything into it.

<comment><USER7> So... you will need to buy a power adapter and an Ethernet cable? That will come to, what, another fiver?

<comment><USER6> There's no ethernet port. So, also an ethernet adapter. But there's only one USB port (µUSB, too, so you most likely need an adapter to regular USB). So if you want more than _just_ ethernet, you'll need an USB hub. But the RasPi's power supply has always been weak, so better get an actively powered one…

And soon you're paying four times as much for the accessories than for the RasPi.

<comment><USER8> How exactly has the power supply been weak? I've been running three PIs (A+, B and B+) for a few years with no problems with just simple cell phone power adapters. However, I'm not plugging any extra hardware into them...perhaps that's why I haven't run into problems?

<comment><USER9> Yes, the parent was talking about lacking power through the Pi's USB ports thus often requiring a powered USB hub.

My issue is with the Pi's use of micro USB for power, I'd rather it use a barrel connector, it's not like it doesn't have the space. Yes, I know the choice is based on the presumption that everyone already has a micro USB power adapter from a cell phone. The use of micro USB for power on this Pi Zero makes a lot more sense given the form factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh Nice! They are finally delivering on what I feel was the great promise of the Raspi in the beginning. Full linux install in the size and price of a micro (read: Arduino).

Some people are bound to gripe about the "lack" of ports but its not like this one displaced the A or B models. Its just another spin of the concept where you don't have to pay for expensive physical parts you don't need. Its a linux server at a price cheap enough to buy one for each little project you want to do and then _leave it there_. Makers rejoice.

I've got to hand it to the Raspi folks. They've really done an outstanding job creating their product line and getting it out to the masses. When they started, there was nothing but a sea of vaporware and "next-year" promises in the inexpensive SBC linux world. I rather famously doubted them at first. I am very happy to have been wrong.

<comment><USER11> I have no idea why Arduino is so popular--it has NO debugging support unless you use an ICE. (People "debug" with printf statements.) We use Netduinos because with .NET we can single step and inspect variables in live code.

<comment><USER12> Why is Arduino so popular? Brand name recognition, a decent standard library, and a _ton_ of sample code and tutorials online.

I agree that it's not a great platform, though. I personally prefer STM32 these days; it's dirt cheap (a basic development board is <$5) and powerful (72 MHz / 20 KB RAM / 128 KB flash on one of those boards). I believe there's even a way to integrate it into the Arduino IDE nowadays!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through. I'm a terrible nerd. :(

<comment><USER14> why not build a htpc or an arcade box? very straight forward and you'll have more to talk about when your friends come over!

<comment><USER15> Can you actually build an HTPC? My understanding is they can't really handle video, except from the purpose-built camera module.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly wrong. They have the same processors as used in phones, which means they have hardware level decoding for video. My B+ can stream massive 1080p blu-ray rips over ethernet with zero problems. They make fantastic HTPCs.

<comment><USER17> My phone doesn't ever play 12GB blu-ray rips; and the rpi hardware is older than current phones (which use armv7 and armv8). Given the speed of the cpu, it's surprising it can decode a full H264 stream.

But It's good to know. The down-vote seems unnecessary.

<comment><USER18> It's not so much software running on the CPU doing the work here. It's hardware support for decoding via the GPU that enables it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems like an important moment for humans and computers. The cable to connect the computer now costs more than a 1GHZ computer.

It feels a lot like a tipping point for something.

[http://makezine.com/2015/11/25/raspberry-pi- announces-5-comp...](http://makezine.com/2015/11/25/raspberry-pi- announces-5-computer-model-zero/)

<comment><USER4> The cable to connect the computer now has more markup than a 1 GHz computer. Micro-USB OTG and mini HDMI adapters go for £1 each shipped on eBay, and I think most of that price is shipping. (Likewise, they've omitted the 40-pin GPIO header unless you buy the £10 bundle with the "Essentials kit", compared to £4 for the Pi itself.)

Old, old business model - cut the headline price to the bone, make it back on cables.

<comment><USER20> I can't really see that — neither the circuit board header nor the cables are proprietary.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't have to be - they're relying on people not shopping around for the cables and accessories, much like big brick-and-mortar retailers such as Best Buy have done for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Arduino Uno for $2, NodeMCU for $3, RPi for $5... please let this trend continue. A year or two, and we'll basically have computronium - simple dev boards powerful and cheap enough to just tile your house with them.

I've recently figured out that there's no point in designing your own PCB for placing sensors at home, when you can get an Arduino and an ESP8266 for $5; add power (and some ~$0 of voltage regulation) and you have a base station. Or just buy NodeMCU for $3 and skip on wiring Arduino and ESP8266 together.

<comment><USER22> Even more awesome: Skip the extra Arduino and use the ESP8266 as your Arduino.

[https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino](https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino)

<comment><USER23> I realise how silly this question may seem but here we go:

If I get an ESP8266, I can have something that run code, sit on my home network wirelessly and use it to do things like report on sensor inputs? Am I missing some larger expense that would be required as this seems _very_ cheap compared to other options I've seen.

<comment><USER24> Yes. At least for limited values of yes.

You need to run it on 3.3v which means 3.3v versions of your sensore or external level shifting. You've got limited IO compared to, say, Arduino.

But of you've got 3.3v sensors - yeah - all you need is an ESP8266 and some way of providing 3.3v. (And probably some pulldown/up resistors and decoupling caps...)

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure the digital I/O on the ESP8266 is actually 5V tolerant according to the datasheet, though this isn't widely advertised and there's some inaccurate information drifting around from back when the specs weren't fully known. (The same isn't true of some official Arduino boards which should not be exposed to 5V on the I/O pins.) It's a very nice little chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Love watching the progress of Raspberry Pi. The attraction of the platform to me (compared to something more capable, with more ram ghz etc) is that the ecosystem is now so mature, you can easily google and get a cut and paste guide to exactly what you want to do. This means you can spend time tinkering with aspects that interest you rather than maintaining an operating system or troubleshooting hardware...

I'm curious to see how far optimisations could go. Analagous to the old consoles where developers could squeeze incredible performance out (compared to the equivalent processors elsewhere) since it was so uniform. e.g. the later games on a nintendo or neo geo were incredible compared to what was capable on a typical 8/16 bit computer of the time.

A $5 version is just going to accelerate this ecosystem... looking forward to it.

<comment><USER26> There is a _lot_ of capability on the graphics side, which takes up most of the die. Can run Quake3 etc. Not very impressive compared to modern PC graphics, but very handy if you want to put something on a small screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would love to see someone sell these as preconfigured as minimal bandwidth tor exit nodes with wifi so they can be spread far and wide. Just connect to power, make sure it is connected to a wifi network and then leave it alone. Just make sure it advertises itself as such so that law enforcement knows that it is likely not owned by the owner of the Internet connection and therefore doesn't make sense to do anything other than find the device and disable it if that's what they want. It should have a similar disclaimer as the standard tor exit not notice, except it should say something like "this tor exit node is operating on a disposable computer and was placed clandestinely on this network without the consent of the owner" or something to that effect.

I know there are ethical implications here, but that doesn't mean that something like this shouldn't or won't exist eventually.

<comment><USER28> These are not well suited for Tor. No built in networking and a serious lack of CPU power needed for processing encryption.

<comment><USER29> How much CPU power do you need to process encryption in TOR?

<comment><USER30> No wifi, no Ethernet. You need to use a USB adapter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The 80s are widely considered as the golden age of hacking, but what the hell? I just bought ten microcontrollers that can run Lua/Python/C for $20, there are full-blown computers for $5, and all the supporting ecosystem (sensors, components, etc) is cheaper than most toys.

I am very optimistic about the future, given that people (and children) these days have trivially cheap access to powerful programmable and easily connectable computers, and hopefully they'll start to demand more and more that all their other devices are equally hackable. If most people have a microcontroller at home that they made themselves that controls the coffee maker, they will want to be able to connect other stuff around the house up, and that can only be done with open protocols.

The next few years are going to be very interesting on the maker scene.

<comment><USER32> Plus standardisation (linux, usb, arm, etc) which I understand was one thing lacking in the 80s.

<comment><USER33> The standard was pretty simple in the 80's, > 3 V = 1, anything below that counts as a 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Amazing. If only I'd get my act together and do all the amazing stuff I planned when I bought my first pi - then I could justify buying this

<comment><USER35> Two years after buying mine, I put the pi to a good use only last week! Now I am using it as ad-blocker thanks to [http://pi-hole.net/](http://pi- hole.net/), works like a charm.

I ported the web interface for pi-hole to Go single executable ([https://github.com/girishso/pi-hole-web](https://github.com/girishso/pi- hole-web))

Now looking for something interesting to do on my second pi!

Edit: Added pi-hole-web link.

<comment><USER36> That's great, thanks!!

I have a pi as a media server* connected to a projector via HDMI, that reads media files from a NAS on my home network; very efficient and lightweight.

I will definitely try pi-hole; maybe I can have both running on the same pi.

* via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist...

<comment><USER37> > * via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist...

Try OSMC [1], it's a massive improvement over Raspbmc and is being developed actively. Works like a charm. If I'm correct, the main Raspbmc dev went over to OSMC a while back.

[1] [https://osmc.tv](https://osmc.tv)

<comment><USER26> My frequently asked question: if I want to watch and record DVB-T television, what media centre solution should I be using?

<comment><USER38> I have been running the Pi since 2012 from the early days of Raspbmc to OSMC and sometime in 2013 starting watching and recording television using it.

I have ATSC (North American Over-The-Air TV) which is similar to DVB-T. I use an HDHomerun Network TV tuner. I watch using my Pi running OSMC and an Add-on for DVBLink, and when I select record, I use DVBLink software which runs on my Synology NAS. DVBLink however is paid software that can run on the Pi, as well as many other platforms (Windows, Linux, Asustor, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, Western Digital).

I tried using TVHeadend but found the interface and support of DVBLink to be better.

My other Pi currently runs Volumio ([https://volumio.org](https://volumio.org)) for music streaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is great, but for people who want to "get started in computing", don't they also need a display, a mouse and a keyboard?

LCD screens are like, $100, a mouse is $10-$20 new and low-end keyboards are $10-$30. At that combined price, why does it matter if the computer is $25 or $5?

And if one is going to outlay the 150 bucks in peripherals, they might as well spend a bit more than $5 on the computer to get a significantly better computing experience.

Is there anything else going on here? Do they have a different approach that I'm not getting? It feels like, yeah, Moore's law is great and computers are cheap, but once RPi got to around or <$50 (which it did with the first version anyway), the computer was already cheaper than everything you needed to plug in to it.

<comment><USER40> There is a lot of peripherals lying around. Even years ago when I didn't have two pennies to rub together I could still get unwanted keyboards/mice and even smaller unwanted screens.

On the flip side, I don't need a screen for all my computers. Some are network devices now (SSH only) and some share the same screen because I use them for different things at different times.

<comment><USER41> Right? But there are also plenty of computers with 512 MB of RAM lying around that you can get for free. And they're 'programmable' too.

<comment><USER42> Physical space, noise, and running costs are also important considerations for many people.

<comment><USER40> Yes, running this as a useful network device (storage, irc bot, etc..) off a small solar panel is pretty neat side project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ah well. I recently (a week ago) started a new project with the Arduino and then they release this beast. It's basically cheaper than an Arduino (except that there's no storage in the Pi) AND faster than the Arduino.

Sure, it won't have the same IO capabilities as there's much more layers but it will be pretty close and I don't really need great performance anyways.

I guess, I'll have to switch to the Pi, it's not even a fair race at this point.

(luckily for me, I was mostly writing the SaaS that would work with the Arduino and only spent about a full day's work doing C/C++ coding so far)

<comment><USER44> Well, I would like to note that people on a budget have been buying Arduino Nano with USB for $2 from eBay for a long time.

<comment><USER45> Or a clone of SparkFun's ProMicro, which is absolutely awesome. It's basically Arduino Leonardo (Mega32U4) in the 'micro' form factor and able to work either on 3.3V or 5V. You can get it at around $3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Next awesome step would be RPi with integrated wifi/bluetooth, and it would become ultimate IoT/embedded development platform.

Such step would increase price, I know, but AFAIK, most people are almost always buying either wifi or bluetooth dongles anyway.

All in all, RPi ables to deliver exciting, rather (for me) unexpected and most importantly great and user-friendly products.

<comment><USER6> You can find zigbee, wifi or bt dongles for $8 or less these days. I suspect board development costs are the limiting factor for the Foundation here, it's easier to slap on USB and tell users to plug in what they need.

<comment><USER46> hm, I probably should check now, but were I live (non US), the last time I've checked zigbee prices started from 19$ :(

But still the best thing will be that:

\- you will not need any dongles

\- can embed your project immediately

\- better compatibility with hardware and software (hopefully) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Too bad they didn't include camera module connector (CSI). Low-latency hardware-encoded h264 stream from camera is one of the most cool features in RPi platform. The Zero would be great e.g. for FPV fying folks, if it supported camera module. (USB cameras aren't answer here, as they typically don't have low-latency hw-encoding.)

<comment><USER48> Yeah, I had hoped for that as well. But connectors cost money. Could the camera module be attached via the header?

<comment><USER12> > Could the camera module be attached via the header?

No. The Raspberry Pi GPIO header doesn't include all pins, and in particular it doesn't include pins that were used for other peripherals, such as the camera and display interfaces.

<comment><USER47> Interestingly you can get out DPI display signal from GPIO pins. Adafruit is using this technique with their Kippah display, giving you fully accelerated display signal (unlike those crappy low-fps-low-res framebuffer driven GPIO displays).

<comment><USER12> Correct. My understanding is that trick was made possible by design -- one of their engineers specifically chose pins to bring out to the GPIO header to facilitate it.

I've seen some variants on the "Kippah" to directly drive VGA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I just... I don't... I'm a bit lost for words.

The sheer amount of "stuff" you get for $5 (albeit USD) is staggering.

I am designing some simple electronics gadgets for Burning Man, and the electronics (low-end MSP430 based) for that is costing me a significant portion of $5 yet its significantly less powerful.

I know, I know, volume is a key issue, but honestly, that doesn't make it any less impressive to me.

<comment><USER50> The Pi foundation being good friends with Broadcom also helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Broadcom must be delighted to have managed to find a use for their obsolete part from 2007 or so. Some accountant, somewhere, is happy :-)

Probably a neat little board too, but unlikely to be $5. It's at £11.88 [0] ex VAT ex shipping at farnell UK (and can't be ordered anyway) -- that's more like nearly $20 these days.

[0]: [http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspberrypi-zero/sbc- zero...](http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspberrypi-zero/sbc- zero/dp/2508221)

<comment><USER52> It's £4 in the Pi Hut (disabling the extras): [http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi- zero](http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero)

<comment><USER51> Nice one, they are not too extortionate on the 'essential kit' either.

That pi zero might become an alternative (for me) to the Olinuxino Micro [0] and the NanoPi [1] -- these are ARM9 based so even more dated than the Pi Zero; however I can boot these two in 0.7 seconds to an application, so they've been the first draft of quite a few professional projects for me...

[0]: [https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLin...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLinuXino- NANO/open-source-hardware) [1]: [http://nanopi.org/NanoPi_Feature.html](http://nanopi.org/NanoPi_Feature.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The Specs:

\- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor

\- 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)

\- 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM

\- A micro-SD card slot

\- A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output

\- Micro-USB sockets for data and power

\- An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header

\- Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B

\- An unpopulated composite video header

\- Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm

Source: [http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi- ze...](http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-zero)

<comment> david-given Don't forget, also, that the ARM11 in the BCM2835 is actually just a secondary processor; the main CPU is a blisteringly fast dual-core Videocore 4, which lots of interesting DSPish and vector processing instructions. (You can call out to it from the ARM.)

See: [http://maazl.de/project/vc4asm/doc/index.html](http://maazl.de/project/vc4asm/doc/index.html)

And if you're into shader programming, the GPU has a 24 GFLOP shader unit.

[https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv- qpu](https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu)

Only suitable for very specialised purposes, but astonishingly fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'd like an updated Compute Module. Given how small the Pi Zero is, it should be doable to fit it inside the layout and with the connectors of a MiniPCIe board (though, of course not with the pinout).

Also, the compute module has support for USB Slave mode but there is no documentation for this - I'd like to see some expansion in this area as well.

Or choosing of a CPU with a MII interface to allow _real_ GBit or, heck, fiber/powerline/wifi adapters...

<comment><USER5> Same here. What I'm fantasizing about is a kit with a set of compute modules in a "tower stack" with a power supply, with horizontally oriented boards stacked on the height, with all compute modules connected to ports in the tower.

And you could choose where the pin-outs leads - either straight out to connect to some electronics on the outside, or straight down to a router in the bottom.

Then you could dedicate some pins on all boards to link to the router, making for a small compact HPC setup (easy to ventilate too) and connect stuff like per-module LED rows for module status info and whatever else you might like.

Bonus point for a "split" tower with modules on both sides, folding down like some toolboxes do: [https://www.howdentools.com/data/howden/ul/1406847600/140933...](https://www.howdentools.com/data/howden/ul/1406847600/1409331356b2885a151f3a0c2bea69246f9f1356c4.jpg)

<comment><USER26> What's this stack for? I'd be very surprised if it beat PC hardware + GPU for MIPS or FLOPS per $ or watt.

<comment><USER55> Agreed for a supercomputer design it would be awful, but for a stereotypical 99.9999% CPU idle applications, the big win would be total cost of ownership / capex.

On a long term view from many decades of observation, the digital world is bifurcating into one world thats 100% utilized all the time in data centers or real time control or video gaming, and another world that's 99.999% idle but when its active the users want it infinitely fast. And the two worlds don't talk or cross pollinate and are gradually using separate hardware.

Having spent some time in electronics labs, given experimental results with smoke emitting diodes, and given the GPIO ports, there is minimization of the total cost of hardware experiments. If you assume 5% of boards will be destroyed per PID/motion control lab, then minimization of board cost is key to minimization of cost of running the lab. Implementing a PC that costs 20 times as much but provides 100 times the performance would only result in increasing the cost of the lab by 20 times.

There is also a total wattage ecological argument. I have a pi running a 3-d printer and it works great and only draws a couple watts, but the web application is extremely fat and pointlessly featureful "because the cycles are there so may as well use them" and its not like installing a 100 watt PC would make better prints, it would just make an even more elaborate UI to use all available CPU cycles thus burn more coal. A 300 watt tor node doesn't really do anything a 3 watt tor node does, other than burn 100 times the coal.

<comment><USER26> Most of this is the case for using _one_ Pi, but not a stack of Pies. Unless you have some sort of micro-AWS which turns off the 99% unused ones. Ten boards drawing 100mW at idle are the same as one board drawing 1W at idle.

<comment><USER56> Except that when one board fails out of 10, there are 9 others still alive whereas in the other case you are toast.

<comment><USER57> I would expect the complexities of distributing a workload over 10 boards would result in downtime far exceeding that of a single more powerful machine left doing its thing, for all but a few highly battle tested applications.

A fair accounting includes the fragility of software, not just hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> \- 1ghz arm11 (40% faster than original pi)

\- 512MB ram

\- HDMI

\- Micro-usb

\- Micro-SD

\- 40 pin GPIO

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi- zero/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/)

</comment><comment><USER59> I learned to take these pricing claims with a large grain of salt. $5 sounds great and makes for great news. But then I head over to Farnell/element14 and learn that a) this is unobtainium, because the first shipment is expected on Dec 21, and b) it will cost me $17 + VAT + shipping.

The title should say "the computer that _might_ be available to _some people_ at $5 at _some time in the future_ ".

<comment><USER60> The TCO for something that can operate similarly to a computer, should be around 50 USD (micro-USB cable, HDMI cable, eth/wlan adapter, case).

But all in all it's an impressive little machine that can do wonders for small home/school projects.

<comment><USER44> Don't be ridiculous. $5 will get you 80% of these peripherals from eBay. Especially if you're on the budget.

<comment><USER61> Sure if you fancy the risk of your house going up in flames because you bought some dodgy no-name power supply knocked out in a Chinese electronics sweatshop.

<comment><USER21> How big is that a risk, though? Serious question - because I'm really considering using Chinese USB power supply units as power sources for my home automation project. I've been using one of those units for the last 5 days with no visible problems - no overheating, no noise, etc.

<comment><USER62> For that application it is better to get officially imported ones (eg. CE- marked in Europe), where at least the importer is vouching that the design meets minimum safety requirements.

See [http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab- ap...](http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple- is.html) for some horror stories about crap USB chargers.

<comment><USER21> Mine[0] has CE on the back, but this is China, they print anything and everything on the back...

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10632118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10632118)

<comment><USER63> CE stands for Chinese Engineering :D

<comment><USER64> Close.. I believe it actually is 'Chinese Export' when you ask but the goal is the same, to imply certification (o;

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Fantastic development, but I can't help but think about the years of pain we're going to be in security wise when people inevitably start using these for all sorts of "Internet of Things" purposes. Software stacks on these type of devices inevitably have lackluster cipher suites, sub-par protocol support, unpatched kernel/userland, etc—even if they run all the latest things out right now, they WILL get out of date and WILL NOT receive patches!

<comment><USER20> Not sure what you mean by "these type of devices", but you will be overjoyed that on Raspbian, updating the system is as easy as `apt-get udate && apt-get -y upgrade`, the kernel is currently v4.1.13 [1], and the rest of your comment is also FUD.

[1] [https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/ker...](https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/kernel.img)

<comment><USER66> I wouldn't call it FUD. Embedded devices tend to get updated less frequently than PCs. Connecting them all to the internet is not helping.

<comment><USER67> If security is an issue set it up to run a system cron job to update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I don't see anything about Ethernet/Wi-Fi. Am I missing something?

I understand they had to cut some features to reduce the prize. But networking is such a fundamental requirement for these types of systems, you'd think that it would be the last feature to be excluded.

<comment> TD-Linux The networking on the other Pis is attached via USB. It's a very easy and obvious thing to drop.

<comment><USER68> Yeah I guess.

Still, I for one would be more than willing to pay a few extra bucks for a stripped-down version of the Pi with wireless included.

Actually, all I'm looking for in this type of machine is Linux, Wi-Fi and GPIO, in a reasonably compact format. Maybe the Pi isn't a good fit, since it is more about "teaching computing" than "building your IoT stuff".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69>
      The Zero, which like its predecessors is being manufactured in Wales

I have an original RPI made in China. That was right before the made them in UK, as far as I remember.

The Zero would need an Ethernet-port addon-board.

And for further RPI 2 iterations they should move the power-connector to a different position (e.g. like the original RPI) - would be better for headless embedded projects with limited space. Having the Ethernet and power cable on the same (or opposite) side would be a great benefit.

<comment><USER70> For 5 bucks it's fine without an Ethernet controller.

I'm all for bare minimum functionality at this price.

If you want connectivity there are plenty of options available:

\- buying its "big" brothers instead

\- use a USB to Ethernet adapter

\- Buy a wireless dongle ([http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-wipi- wireless-adap...](http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-wipi-wireless- adapter))

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I find the lack of ethernet or wifi concerning. I get that they're trying to keep it small and low cost, but I can't immediately see any use for a Pi that can't run standalone.

<comment><USER72> It's easy to imagine multiple simple designs. You can couple it with an ESP2866, for example, using a number of attinys to access their analog inputs, or with a CAN-SPI head collecting data from multiple sensors, processing and then reporting through an ESP2866.

<comment><USER66> The ESP8266 is quite slow, network wise. You could hook up the sensors to the Pi Zero directly using the GPIO ports and use a cheap USB WiFi adapter to upload the data.

<comment><USER72> I guess it would be harder to power an USB WiFi adapter. And it's not going to be cheaper than ESP2866.

<comment><USER66> Actually a 802.11n USB adapter costs $1.55, that's cheaper than a ESP8266.

<comment><USER72> The cheapest I could find was around £2.50. I could never run one with RPi without a powered USB hub, so add at least £5 more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Raspberry still costs more than 100$ in my country, due the rarity of such tools sometimes we found ourselves obliged to buy it with that price and pay the difference, and even though this is such a great step, i really doubt it would have any effect on 3rd world countries where this is really needed.

<comment><USER74> Why the huge difference in costs..? International shipping..?

<comment><USER75> I suspect it's due to the combination of low sales volumes and import taxes. Here in Chile, Pi B's are around $50–60. Though to be fair, traditional PCs and laptops are more expensive than in the US (but not 2x as expensive).

<comment><USER26> I know Brazil has prohibitive import duties on electronics, does this also apply to Chile?

<comment><USER76> But books, magazines, etc. don't pay taxes. That's why this free Rpi with MagPi #40 is awesome: you don't have to pay taxes at all.

<comment><USER75> > But books, magazines, etc. don't pay taxes. That's why this free Rpi with > MagPi #40 is awesome: you don't have to pay taxes at all.

I assume you mean in Brazil? Books and very expensive in Chile, compared to other things. And I believe it's because they are heavily taxed. I don't know about magazines, though.

<comment><USER76> Yes, I meant Brazil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> It is so sad that when it comes to India price is increased to $18 [http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-79263](http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-79263)

<comment><USER78> That's because they're throwing in a HDMI cable as well as an OTG cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Quick specs for those who don't wanna click on the article:

      A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
      1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
      512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
      1 x micro-SD card slot
      1 x mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
      Micro-USB sockets for data and power
      Unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
      Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
      Size: 65mm x 30mm x 5mm

</comment><comment><USER79> Free Raspberry Pi Zero with the magazine, wow!

"Zero" is a great model name, since the price is negligible (approximately equal to 0 for most purposes).

</comment><comment><USER80> $5 is an amazing price for something so functional.

The current go-to device for semi-disposable network-attached devices is the ESP8266, which was supposed to be a WiFi add-on board for the Arduino until someone ported Lua to run on it[2]. That is ~$3, but nowhere near as functional as the Pi Zero.

[1] [https://batilanblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/first- experienc...](https://batilanblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/first-experiences- with-the-lua-nodemcu-esp8266-based-wifi-network-development-board/)

[2] [http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html](http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> That's great.

Personally, one of the downsides of the original RPi (and RPi 2 as well), was it's , believe it or not, size.

Sometimes I wanted to have some portable embedded projects, for which small micro-controller would not be enough, but RPi, was 10 times bigger.

But it's just my personal nitpick, overall RPi devices, community and it's ecosystem is just great.

</comment><comment><USER81> Just as CHIP was announcing their $8 computer: [http://getchip.com/](http://getchip.com/) . It has wifi and bluetooth though. Same as Pi, watch for high shipping costs.

<comment><USER82> And 4GB of flash on SoC, also apparently some direct support for LiPO batteries. Not that I really understand it but makes the $9,$8 fair compared to the $5 pizero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I know I'm complaining about an almost free computer, but ARM11 (ARMv6) isn't compatible with most Linux OSes which long ago moved to ARMv7. If only this was compatible with ARMv7 it would run a lot more stuff.

<comment><USER84> Not sure I understand. I runs Debian derivatives like Raspian, Ubuntu, and Kali. If you're a masochist it'll run Windows 10 IoT core.

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/)

[https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/raspberry- pi-l...](https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/raspberry-pi-luks-disk- encryption/)

<comment><USER85> The only modern distro it runs is Raspbian. Ubuntu and Kali don't run on it let alone Windows 10 IoT core, same goes for Arch and pretty much everything else.

This is a ARMv6, for which most distros stopped support several years ago if they ever ran on it.

<comment><USER86> Arch will definitely run on a Pi:

[http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry- pi](http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi)

So will Win10 IOT core, Ubuntu, and several other things:

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/)

<comment><USER85> Win10 IOT core needs ARMv7. The latest Ubuntu with ARMv6 support was karmic (9.10) Forgot about arch Supporting ARMv6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Love the whole raspberry pi mission. I wonder if in 10+ years time we'll see the children learning on it today generating a growth surge in "middle(young)-aged hobbyists"? We all hear about the heyday of the homebrew computer club, maybe the future waves of innovation will be from the "homebrew raspberry pi club". Here's to hoping!!

</comment><comment><USER88> Somewhat disappointing that in Australia RPi Zero costs AU$19.38 (plus AU$12.95 shipping). Quite a lot more than US$5 (=AU$6.93).

<comment><USER89> $19.29 over here in SGD :<

wished it had wifi tho

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> By the way, if you get a bunch of these and want to have them communicate with other devices and themselves in a secure manner, I wrote a library to do just that:

[http://www.stavros.io/posts/introducing-string- phone/](http://www.stavros.io/posts/introducing-string-phone/)

Feedback appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER90> Someone made this nice comparison over on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3uc55k/58_years_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3uc55k/58_years_on/)

</comment><comment><USER91> This is awesome. I wonder what the next iteration will be? Will they eventually start giving out Raspberry Pis for free?

<comment><USER92> They already have: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/)

<comment><USER93> It's out of stock :(

<comment><USER94> It's flying off the shelves, had to vist three news outlets to find one! I got a spare one for a family member too, but if they change their mind I'll gladly post to a UK address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> The "$5 computer" is, of course, £4 in the UK. [http://pimoroni.com/zero](http://pimoroni.com/zero)

<comment><USER96> Without VAT, it's about $5 [0]

[0] [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%28100%2F%28100%2B20%29+*+...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%28100%2F%28100%2B20%29+*+4%29+gbp+in+usd)

<comment><USER97> Indeed, I just purchased one from [https://shop.pimoroni.com/](https://shop.pimoroni.com/) for £3.33. Alas, it was £3.00 for shipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Amazing news to see this! I made a Homemade Sports Ticker using a Model B almost 1.5 years ago and its still going strong.

Here's a couple of links:

* Blog post: [https://medium.com/@mikemetral/a-homemade-sports-ticker-875c...](https://medium.com/@mikemetral/a-homemade-sports-ticker-875c73a5339)

* Code to write to LED Sign: [https://github.com/metral/led_sign](https://github.com/metral/led_sign)

* Code to pull the scores: [https://github.com/metral/scores](https://github.com/metral/scores)

* The LED sign itself: [http://brightledsigns.com/programmable/indoor/bs-4x16-mini](http://brightledsigns.com/programmable/indoor/bs-4x16-mini)

Fair Warning: I haven't touched the code in over a year so it's not maintained. If I were to do things today, I'd probably switch to Go to make the score requests a bit more streamlined than the single synchronous process I have now, and I would throw it into a container as the #1 request I get is people struggling to install both the code base and the dependencies.

Happy Hacking!

<comment><USER99> That's cool man, I'm sure you're friend was stoked. Props on the write up. I've got an old monitor I want to connect to the Pi, just not sure what info is worth displaying yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I'd like to get into this world. At this point I don't have enough experience or knowledge to know what kinds of things I can do with this thing. Or what kinds of things this is more appropriate for compared to a Raspberry Pi 2, or vice versa. Any pointers?

Could I make some kind of driver/controller for a small synchronized christmas light show with this? Or some kind of toy with lights and sounds for my toddlers?

<comment><USER43> Yes and yes. Obviously, you will need a bit more hardware than only a Raspberry Pi.

The simplest one I found is here: [http://opensource.com/life/15/2/music- light-show-with-raspbe...](http://opensource.com/life/15/2/music-light-show- with-raspberry-pi)

And there's plenty of other results on 'raspberry christmas lights'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Even without the Ethernet connector this is impressive. Yes, you should add the microSD, cables and peripherals cost, but even adding that the RPi Zero is a marvel.

[http://theunshut.com/2015/11/26/raspberry-pi- zero-5-dollar-m...](http://theunshut.com/2015/11/26/raspberry-pi- zero-5-dollar-micro-pc/)

It's amazing what you can do with $5.

</comment><comment><USER102> > Today, I'm pleased to be able to announce the immediate availability of > Raspberry Pi Zero, made in Wales and priced at just $5.

I'm confused: they say it's $5 but at Adafruit (one of the places where USAians can buy it), the cheapest are the Raspberry Pi Zero Starter Pack and the Raspberry Pi Zero Budget Pack, priced at $59.95 and $29.95, respectively.

<comment><USER103> It's $5 at Adafruit. The starter pack has a whole bunch of stuff you might want for your first Pi, but probably can scrounge around for free or cheaper.

<comment><USER102> If it's $5 at Adafruit, then how come it doesn't show it? Most of the time a store will list something even if it's out of stock, but will just put a sticker on the entry that says "Out of stock".

<comment><USER104> The $5 standalone was on their site yesterday morning with an "Out of stock" label. I suspect I wasn't the only person who was annoyed to see that listed next to the bundles, and they removed it because complaining.

I still bought a bundle, because I haven't found any other way to get this in the next few weeks, and the board plus a few basics will be a great <$10 white elephant gift (after I see if I want to keep it for myself).

<comment><USER102> I was only considering buying it myself _because_ it was only $5. I've been needing a new computer. Lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> To what degree are the power requirements on their faq still valid for the pi zero ? [https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#power](https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#power)

The question I really want to ask is, how long will a 1.2A supply last with nothing else attached to it ?

<comment><USER106> Your question isn't meaningful, because amps are a measure of the rate at which a power supply can provide current.

An AA battery can provide 1.2A for maybe an hour or two; a wall wart can provide 1.2A indefinitely.

<comment><USER107> He most probably meant 1.2Ah

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Blown away with this. As a youngster cutting my teeth on Cambridge based computers, great to see a Welsh machine. Currently using RPis for most of my development, I'm working on a design for a RP laptop. Not hard, but I did want to thrown in multiple boards. This looks to be one way to achieve this. Technical details (cant seem to find any power requirements) and tour here from adafruit:

\- [https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi- zero...](https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi- zero?view=all)

\- [https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885](https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885)

<comment><USER109> Do you want to have multiple boards in a laptop? In that case, it would be great to have high-speed interconnect between them, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> I _just_ received "Black Friday promo" from chip ([http://getchip.com/](http://getchip.com/)) which claim to sell s/$9/$8 computer. I wonder how they fare with this new RPi.

</comment><comment><USER111> A single transistor cost several dollars in 1950. A full-blown 1GHz computer is now the same price (cheaper even, accounting for inflation).

What will $5 buy in 2080? It's going to be a billion times faster than this, but it's hard to imagine the form factor.

<comment><USER112> It will buy you hours of virtual computing power somewhere...

<comment><USER33> Yes, but how will you interface that virtual computing power to an led, a switch, a relay or a ntc?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> $5 price tag makes sense now considering you can buy a full smartphone for that much now:

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-paragon-4g-with-4gb- me...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-paragon-4g-with-4gb-memory-no- contract-cell-phone-black/4297500.p)

(just don't try to order more than two or hours later your order will be canceled)

or

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/verizon-wireless-prepaid- motorol...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/verizon-wireless-prepaid-motorola- moto-e-4g-with-8gb-memory-no-contract-cell-phone-with-blue-grip-case- black/4407800.p)

</comment><comment><USER114> This is neat, but I'd rather see a $10-$15 board with onboard WiFi.

</comment><comment><USER115> I just bought 2 magpi to get 2 raspiberry pi zero but connecting then to a android charger (without and with sdcard [http://director.downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/imag...](http://director.downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/raspbian_lite-2015-11-24/2015-11-21-raspbian- jessie-lite.zip)) none of then lights the green led to indicate power on.

Someone have a different experience or can tell something about this ?

<comment><USER116> I bought a copy of MagPi, and my Raspberry Pi Zero does not light up when I apply power. But if I connect it to my PC with a USB cable the Broadcom BCM2708 Boot device is detected, so I assume it is working. I haven't tested with SDcard present.

<comment><USER115> Yes I also did connect to my linux laptop and it also detects the Broadcom BCM2708. I was expecting to be able to connect it to a linux box via usb as it is and open a ssh connection through tty but they didn't made it that easy it's a shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> Hi, maybe not entirely relevant for this topic - but maybe you guys have any idea how to build and cheap system which will gather temperature wireleslly to one place. Ideally I'd like to have 2 sensors (one inside and other outside, with own batteries) which will send data to some central device.

I have home server on MacMini - so WiFi could be option. Any ideas?

I've always wanted to build something like this which - but always ended calculations that are rather expensive and devices are relatively big.

<comment><USER118> How about running a http server on the mac exposing restful api, and using something like ESP8266 + temperature sensor, sending basic http requests to the server every minute or so? Should be much cheaper than arduino.

<comment><USER117> but I have to connect ESP8266 to something (Arduino?) or is it standalone device?

<comment><USER118> standalone :) some inspirations for you [http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/esp8266-web-server- farm/](http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/esp8266-web-server-farm/) [http://www.instructables.com/id/ESP8266-Wifi-Temperature- Log...](http://www.instructables.com/id/ESP8266-Wifi-Temperature-Logger/)

If you end up working on it, feel free drop me an email, I'm really curious about the result :)

<comment><USER117> ok, thanks :)

<comment><USER119> Be careful with that "Instructables" article. The author powers the ESP8266 from the Arduino's 3.3V power out pin. The ESP8266 can want to use more current than the Arduino is rated to supply.

I've looked at a few "Instructables" articles on ESP8266 and Arduino, and a large fraction of them seem to have this issue.

Another issue many of them that use a 5V Arduino have is that they ignore the difference between the logic levels of the 5V Arduino and the 3.3V ESP8266. For the connection from the ESP8266 UART Tx to the Arduino Rx, that's probably fine. The ESP8266 will drive the line to 3.3v, and that is high enough for the Arduino to recognize it as high on the Rx line, as long as you are powering the Arduino through the USB port or through the barrel jack (I'm using Arduino Uno for my examples, so some adjustment may be needed for other models).

If you are powering through the 5V pin, which bypasses the 5V regulator on the Arduino, then you could have a problem if your voltage is high. The minimum voltage seen as a logic 1 on the input pins goes up as supply voltage goes up, and since you are already near the edge when hooking an 3.3V ESP8266 up directly, you have to be careful.

For the connection the other way, Arduino UART Tx to ESP8266 UART Rx, you are putting a 5V signal on a pin that's supposed to only take up to 3.3V. The ESP8266 has built-in protection against over-voltage which probably will save you, but this is not good practice.

Simplest fix here is to use a 1k and 2k resistor to make a voltage divider for the Arduino Tx -> ESP8266 Rx signal. Note that this only works for going from the higher voltage side to the lower voltage side. That's fine here, since on the Tx->Rx connection only the Tx side drives the line.

If you have to hook different voltage I/O pins together and both sides can drive, you need something more elaborate. There's a cool solution that uses two resistors and a MOSFET. That, and some others, is given here [1].

[1] [http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97889/is- ther...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97889/is-there-any- bidirectional-5v-3-3v-level-shifter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> All sold out!

Wanted the MagPI Magazine with a free RPi Zero but its sold out!

</comment><comment><USER121> When I see $5 all I can think about is a massive cluster of these working together with something like Apache Mesos ([http://mesos.apache.org/](http://mesos.apache.org/)). The Raspberry Pi Zero, due to low cost, low power requirements (Around the 160mA mark (0.5/0.7W!) and small form factor, could be the future of data centres.

You could literally build a _100Ghz_ machine for $500.

</comment><comment><USER122> For me, the best thing about this is not the price. It's the combination of small form factor and no Ethernet/USB hub. With the original Pi, almost half the power consumption came from the USB hub/Ethernet controller chip - <USER2> was always the main advantage of the Model A, which could be very useful for small robots. I would assume the Zero shares that advantage, while being smaller, faster, and more RAM.

</comment><comment><USER123> This is intriguing.

Is there a list somewhere that shows the cheapest possible place to get raspberry hardware modules.

Also, where do you guys buy your modules? You can include Arduino stuff.

<comment><USER43> I just use eBay for Arduino stuff. It's a bit more expensive than AliExpress but I suppose I get a bit more buyer protection.

This screen* is pretty cheap, right? I'm currently using one (on an Arduino, different seller) and it works great.

* [http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2004-204-20x4-Character-LCD-Displa...](http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2004-204-20x4-Character-LCD-Display-Module-HD44780-Controller-Blue-Blacklight-/181924103697?hash=item2a5b858611:g:TGMAAOSw5VFWPEpl)

<comment><USER123> That's really cheap compared to where I got mine along time ago. Very Cool!

<comment><USER43> If you don't mind waiting for a month or so (depends on your location), you probably won't find anything cheaper unless you live in China/Singapore or buy bulk :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> The MagPi magazine comes with a Raspberry Pi Zero, like the old floppies of the 90s. The lady at WHSmith told me they run out as soon as it got in today.

</comment><comment><USER125> Any place where could I find this magazine, guys? Tried in Liverpool Street / Moorgate (WHSmith / Waterstone) with no luck.

<comment><USER126> Couldn't find it in those places in two other locations in outer London. Would be nice to have a list of stockists!

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Does it make sense to run your own hardware again? If you leased rackspace at a provider, you could just have tiny clusters of these everywhere for each service and pay virtually nothing. You could have it triple redundant and have it configured however you wanted.

Edit: it was a dif time, but wasnt that hiw google got started? Tgey just bought a ton of hardware.

<comment><USER128> Like [http://www.pidramble.com/](http://www.pidramble.com/) \- running in my basement right now, but it's comparable in performance (for many workloads) to a cluster of t2.micro instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> I am no Rasberry expect, so I need to ask: Is it possible to connect Rassbery Zero to some network in some convenient way?

<comment><USER130> Something like this would probaly work well, you would probaly be able to hack it and put tbe pi inside.

[http://www.dx.com/p/combo-usb-2-0-lan-ethernet- adapter-3-por...](http://www.dx.com/p/combo-usb-2-0-lan-ethernet- adapter-3-port-hub-for-tablet-pc-dark-grey-147462#.VleeZWiwrMI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> What I would like to know more about is how to power these gadgets. Say I want a sensor that sends data to a server. Do I need to plug it into a power outlet? Can I run it off a battery for a significant amount of time (months)? Can I use solar power? How much power does WiFi consume, or should I look into Bluetooth or ZigBee?

<comment><USER106> > Can I run it off a battery for a significant amount of time (months)?

Depends on how big a battery you're willing to use. In the other thread, someone claimed that the Pi Zero's typical power consumption is about 0.8 watts, so running it for a month would require about 600 watt-hours. That's roughly the energy content of one car battery, or ten Macbook batteries, or about 230 alkaline AAs. A USB wifi adapter would probably add another 0.5-1.0W.

The Raspberry Pi isn't a great option for this kind of long-term low-power application, because it doesn't really have any power management capabilities to speak of. If you can get by with a low duty cycle, you could use additional components to wake up the Pi only when necessary. Less-powerful microcontrollers are more likely to have this functionality built in; for example, TI's Tiva series of ARM Cortex-M4F chips have a "hibernate" mode in which they can draw as little as 5 _microwatts_.

> Can I use solar power?

Again, it depends. A solar panel that can provide ~1W is not very large or expensive, but that's the rated output under direct sunlight. The actual power available could easily be 10x lower if it's cloudy, or 100x lower under very bright indoor lighting. And presumably you'll still want a battery and charging circuitry to keep things running at light or in low light. It's certainly doable, but the power supply will end up costing a lot more than the Pi itself.

<comment><USER131> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> Is there any way to buy these from Europe?

<comment><USER133> The article mentions three vendors in UK. I just ordered mine from [http://pimoroni.com/zero](http://pimoroni.com/zero) (they accept Bitcoin).

<comment><USER132> Thanks! Just ordered mine. Looking forward to learning with it.

Do you have any good bookmarks that You could share with a complete beginner?

<comment><USER133> It's also my first Pi, more of an impulse buy. Have to find out what to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> I suspect this is in competition to the currently-being-released Micro Bit, the BBC's similar tiny computer (The microbit isn't aimed at the same market, as it has buttons and LEDs built onto it, and no HDMI. But it is threatening to push the Raspberry Pi out of UK schools).

</comment><comment><USER135> What speakers/mic/battery/wifi dongle would be best to pair with this if I wanted to make my own open version of the Amazon Echo?

I could see printing a 3D shell and selling a kit for $20 with the appeal of users being able to easily break it down if they wanted to repurpose the RPi.

</comment><comment><USER136> Jack Lang, Chairman of Raspberry Pi gave a fascinating talk about how the Pi came to be at Business of Software Europe last year. (really is worth 33 minutes of your time)

[https://vimeo.com/136196471](https://vimeo.com/136196471)

</comment><comment><USER137> So for the price of a $1000 pc I could get 200 of these. What would be great experiments for them?

<comment><USER138> >What would be great experiments for them?

Donating them to school computer clubs and seeing what teenagers do with them.

<comment><USER137> Well, if I were to use that hypothetical $1000 to help others, I think there would be more efficient ways to use them than donating RPis... my question was trying to point to technological discussion! But thanks for the suggestion nonetheless :P

In the mean time, I found out about Beowulf clusters, highly interesting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> It would be nice if there was an interface to solder on one of these dirt cheap wifi modules. SPI?

<comment><USER140> There are serial-to-wifi modules for the Arduino; surely one of them would work on the RPi header, though you might need some new software to forward the network packets to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> I was really hope they refresh the R-Pi compute module at a pricepoint like this.

</comment><comment><USER82> Cute form factor, let's have pizero hats (battery, lcd, foo).

ps: too late, they're call phats [http://pimoroni.com/zero](http://pimoroni.com/zero) (stupid me)

</comment><comment><USER82> Beside the product himself, thumbs up at the whole team. From a funny project to a very famous name and large community. I can imagine Eben and his friends surprise.

</comment><comment><USER142> Nice. Interesting design choice to not have ethernet on it.

<comment><USER143> Ethernet is handled by an extra chip that also provides the USB hub function. This is wired up like the model A(+) which also doesn't have Ethernet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> I immediately ordered one. It does not have a camera port though, I hoped there were ways to operate the camera through the GPIO but could not find anything.

<comment><USER47> It's possible to connect HDMI display to GPIO pins[1]. Maybe similar technique is also possible with CSI camera connector?

[1] [http://www.adafruit.com/product/2453](http://www.adafruit.com/product/2453)

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> Awesome sauce.

I wonder if they plan to make it modular like the folks over at Project Ara from Google ATAP. That would be a total hit with the Maker community.

<comment><USER5> Like the RPi compute module?

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> The Pi is a wonderfully disruptive thing. I think it's a quiet stalking horse for the second personal computing revolution.

</comment><comment><USER136> Jack Lang - Chairman of Raspberry Pi gave a great talk at Business of Software Europe on how RP came to be and its success since.

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2015/11/the-story-of- raspberry...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2015/11/the-story-of-raspberry-pi- raspberry-pi-zero-jack-lang-business-of-software-europe-2015-talk/)

</comment><comment><USER147> I picked one up because why not but now I need to also buy several adapters so that I can use it.

</comment><comment><USER148> I'm still bothered by Raspberry Pi's choice not to include WIFI by default in all/some of its products.

Almost every Raspberry Pi project I have encountered needs some sort of connectivity and doing this with 3rd party dongles (some don't even work on most recent versions of Raspbian) is just ridiculous in my opinion.

<comment><USER26> That raises the CE certification costs considerably.

<comment><USER148> but if they make like a B2 model + WIFI and just add 10$ to the unit price. That would cover it.

<comment><USER55> Highly unlikely. For a market as immense as the USA that is way too high. For small markets it'll never pay the labor and local-FCC-equivalent certification costs. There would be tradeoffs and other problems; some countries are very locked down and unamused at the idea of someone telling their wifi they are in Japan despite being somewhere else thus enabling unusual power and freq limitations. Small countries and markets would be discriminated against, likely never getting a pi legally shipped to them, an intentionally avoiding serving poor people is kind of counter to most of the politics and rhetoric of the group.

There is a compromise of putting a port on the thing where a locally puchased wifi dongle could be installed. The port would have to provide power and be fast enough to be wifi usable. It would be really nice if that port were popular. The Pi People seem to like community building and a USA distributor could bundle a USA FCC certified wifi adapter with every board, just plug it in. That port is called the USB port. So the solution to various implementation problems devolves into the current situation.

<comment><USER148> This seems now like a first world problem, a nice guide to find would be like "Cheap Wifi dongles that work on raspbian".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER149> Very interesting! Still loving my early Raspberry Pi boards.

</comment><comment><USER150> For $5, I'm in. Now: What the heck can I do with it?

<comment><USER33> Just about everything you can do with a regular linux computer, if you need networking you're going to have shell out a couple of bucks for an interface.

Ideal for embedded stuff, computers that you tie to some appliance, robotics, data acquisition, scada stuff, media players and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER151> That is pretty great, i do which that it had wifi built in. As generally you need an Internet connection, and the usb port for a keyboard.

Plugging in a USB hub fixes the issue, but then it would be smarter to just buy a normal PI.

</comment><comment><USER152> The missing piece to this puzzle is being able to buy these connected to high speed Internet. Maybe Raspberry Pi build build a data center filled with these things.

</comment><comment><USER54> Still lacking: USB Device Mode support... :(

<comment><USER66> The Pi Zero is like the Model A, so device mode should be possible.

See [https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=7409...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=74098)

<comment><USER54> Interesting.

> The single USB port on the model A is capable of working as a USB slave (OTG > mode). The model B cannot do that because of the USB hub/LAN chip being in > the way.

Please, please do not tell me that the Pi CPU has only a single USB controller?! _facepalm_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER153> Really need a full-sized USB host port, so you can hook all kinds of gadget/dongles to it without an odd adapter dangling.

</comment><comment><USER154> Does it still require proprietary blobs to function at all? A $5 ARM computer sounds great, but not if it needs blobs.

<comment><USER155> You can try without a blob: [https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv](https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv)

(booting directly from Broadcom VideoCore IV)

<comment> david-given Even if you write your own VC4 boot code, like a lot of these processors (including the Allwinner!) there's an onboard boot ROM which is the first thing which executes.

On the Pi the boot ROM, which runs on the VC4, has enough intelligence to mount the SD card and load a VC4 executable from there into the internal SRAM. My understanding is that this initialises the SDRAM, and then loads _another_ VC4 executable, which contains the RTOS which runs alongside Linux. Once that's up and running it initialises the ARM processor, loads the ARM kernel, and starts that going.

But you'll _never_ get away from proprietary blobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER156> This is great, truly impressive.

</comment><comment><USER157> for me this is my chance to build a cool digital synth with csound at the core

</comment><comment><USER158> Pretty awesome price point.

</comment><comment><USER159> Sold out at Adafruit which is really the only place to buy it in the US. Life is sad right now...

</comment><comment><USER160> I want to buy 10.

<comment><USER20> Go for it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER161> To me the most significant event is that of a magazine giving a way a computer.

For me something like NVidia Jetson is a far more significant (and useful) development than the ever-shrinking bubblegum stick computers that simply aren't that useful. Yes, it costs 100x more but there's no comparison when it comes to what you can do with one.

And, if that's too much, how about something like this for $39 (includes CPU):

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157594)

or this for $59 (includes CPU):

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138417)

of this one for $99 with a quad-core 2.4 GHz Intel CPU:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157626)

No doubt that a $5 stick computer has huge value for educational purposes and in some parts of the world it's going to make a HUGE difference. Bravo for that.

Yet, we still need a keyboard, mouse (maybe) and a screen. Because the Pi Zero has an HDMI output the cheapest monitor you can buy is likely to be in the $80 to $100 range:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824112...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824112027)

In other words, this is great in that now the cost of the computer has become a rounding error in the total cost of everything you need to actually make it useful.

In other parts of the world if you are going to be in computing the difference between spending $5 and spending $100 is zero. If you have an iPhone in your pocket (very likely) you or your parents can certainly afford to spend $200 on a computer.

Every single kid in the FRC robotics team I mentor has a smart phone and a laptop. If they want to hack on some hardware it'd be no problem for their parents to buy them a $200~$300 setup. You can buy a whole new mini laptop for that kind of money.

Same token, every single kid in the FLL team I mentor owns one or more Lego Mindstorms kit at $350 a piece.

Maybe what I am saying is this: What I would see as having more impact in education (again, the economic in other part of the world are different) isn't necessarily a cheaper computer. A race to the bottom with a crippled $1 computer isn't what is keeping the kids I interact with from having access to technology and computing. No, what's keeping them from entering is a lack of motivation due to a decidedly uninteresting process.

When I was a kid I had to work hard to have a computer. I had to build it out of chips. Wire-wrap it. Bootstrap it with assembler. Write my own Forth. Write my own text editor. Learn about electronics and software. Build my own floppy disk controller board, etc. I was challenged and had to engage in discovery and there was no internet to hold my hand.

I am not sure what the modern equivalent to this might be. I find that things like Pi, for some kids, make things so easy that they are bored almost instantly. Once they get the thing up and going there's nothing to do or whatever it is they can do gets complicated and messy very quickly.

At the other end of the scale I see kids absolutely ripping it with Scratch on their laptops. It's fun, interesting and challenging enough with some guidance.

I don't have the answers. Just a brain dump from working with about 100 kids of different ages and levels of motivation in two robotics programs.

<comment><USER161> I wish down-voters would take a moment to explain why they think a $5 crippled computer is better than a $39 full-featured board.

The context is that, in order to make use of the $5 crippled computer you have to spend, at a minimum, $100 in a keyboard, mouse monitor and power adapter.

I'm sure someone will say you can build little sprinkler system controllers and LED light blinkers and all all manner of other little projects.

Well, here's the problem: Why aren't we teaching our kids to do just that with little $0.50 microcontrollers? Why do we need a HUGE operating system running a gigahertz to teach or build the simplest things?

Here's a over 1,000 microcontrollers from $0.55 upwards with peripherals ranging from CAN, I2C, SPI, UART, USB, USB-OTG, A/D, D/A, Timers, Counters, PWM, WDT, Motor Control, LCD, etc.

[http://goo.gl/Lc5gP6](http://goo.gl/Lc5gP6)

What I see on my end, working with lots of kids, are a bunch of Pi's being bought only to collect dust. The idea of a super-cheap computer on a bubblegum stick might be interesting and heart-warming but the reality I see is that the vast majority of them are bought because of the novelty factor and they set aside and ignored.

I've had far more success with the kids by adopting a simple little 8 bit microprocessor and then teaching them how to do all kinds of interesting things with them in assembler at first and C later.

Their eyes and minds really open up and they gain an understanding that simply cannot be had by having a bubblegum computer with Linux that comes up to a command prompt. Worlds apart. And, oh, yes, none of my kids will ever be confused about pointers, stacks, memory management and a whole host of topics that confuse those who's first contact with computing is running Python on a stick computer of some sort...to turn on a sprinklers valve using a bunch of libraries and megabytes of coder running on a GHz processor.

It's a lot more work as a mentor, but if you really care about the kids and want them to learn and engage their brains, you can't throw a "done for you" solution at them.

<comment><USER162> Bravo. Even more infantilizing are the electronic kits from [http://littlebits.cc](http://littlebits.cc).

<comment><USER161> The weak link is always curriculum. Without a "plan" and mentorship kids learn very little. Sure, they can follow step by step instructions, click things together but they are learning very little.

Most kids learn nothing about strength of mechanical shapes by clicking together lego blocks. However, a curriculum that explicitly teaches how different structural shapes behave under various loads does teach them a lot. Ergo, the vast majority of kids only learn so much by following lego assembly instructions kit after kit.

That's not to say that these toys are not useful. They are. What I am pushing back against is that the cost of the educational toy or tool is directly related to the level of learning it can provide.

BTW, I do think that "little bits" can be useful with the right curriculum. Yet, we are talking about $200 again. This only strengthens my argument that a dive for the bottom it utterly meaningless when it comes to delivering usable value, either for education or for other applications.

In the case of poor countries or really poor people, yes, of course, lower cost could be the difference between access and no access. Yet, that's not the whole story because they need to spend at least $100 to play.

Is that the primary argument and mission of the various Pi boards? To serve the poor? Because, if it is, then I'd like to understand why it uses a video interface that requires fairly recent monitor that will cost somewhere around $80 and $100 in the US. Anyone who can spend that kind of money can afford something much better than a Pi. And far more useful...

Something like this:

[http://goo.gl/QnkvrS](http://goo.gl/QnkvrS)

or this:

[http://goo.gl/Mrgatw](http://goo.gl/Mrgatw)

Most Pi's end-up off in a corner collecting dust or in landfills. They are neat, but I have yet to find them useful. They are not the best financial investment in terms of education. And they are certainly not good enough to be used in commercial or industrial systems. I think their popularity is more of an emotional reaction than a rational decision. You can buy a fully functional Windows laptop for $100. And, if want to run Linux you can dual boot or install a VM.

I just don't see it. And I am talking out of experience with kids from ages 9 up to 17.

<comment><USER162> Do you recommend any sources on kid-friendly electronics curriculum development, either for homeschooling or as a hobby?

<comment><USER161> It's hard. I've done my own over the years. I'll look around and see. Products like SnapCircuits seemed to hold great promise yet they become horribly disappointing once you see a kid go from circuit to circuit without learning a thing. Such wasted potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER155> First thought: Is this an April Fools Joke? :-)

Second thought: This is G-R-E-A-T!!! :-)

</comment><comment><USER163> I'll be that guy. The chip is cool but still requires multiple components through usb to do something useful. What I want is a $5 hackable phone with battery, touch lcd, camera, wifi e.t.c

Great if it has a solar panel and gpio, so I can stick it anywhere and forget about it.

</comment><comment><USER164> The biggest problem I had with my Raspberry PI was that it is seriously slow compared to a desktop machine. It takes time to setup. Time is money, right?

I suppose if you have some mass deployment to do, then great. But for the individual maker hacker.. there must be a better way to setup and experiment than waiting for this computer to reboot with the new config, recompile, etc.

<comment><USER21> I guess it depends on your use case and on your expectations. It took me about as much time to set up my RPi 2 as it takes to set up a new Linux VM, and since then it lies peacefully on top of a wardrobe, and I just connect over SSH to it. Rarely I need to reboot it :).

<comment><USER164> I wanted to set up the pi as a wifi repeater. This sort of thing required lots of reboots. Took way too long to setup.

I think the way it should work is they need an emulator that runs on a desktop machine. Just like iOS & Android development. You get your setup working on the desktop & then deploy to device.

I guess the main problem with this is that often you want to try hardware that only works on the pi. Not sure what the solution is there.

Maybe soon these $5 computers will be screaming fast with fast SSD as well, will reboot in a few seconds, and so no problems.

<comment><USER165> If you do want to play with it as a wifi repeater, perhaps another OS is a good idea? Something like openwrt [https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspber...](https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi) should be quick to write to the SD-card and quick to boot. Raspbian may be a bit heavy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Haggle – Buy and sell things near you. - <AUTHOR> https://haggle.io

<comment><USER2> good name, but isn't this craigslist? If it is, then you should be clear why it's better/faster/easier, if it's not, then you should be clear what it solves that craigslist doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> it's funny how many of these there have been over the years and still nothing can take down craigslist.</comment>