Intel's Next Unit of Computing mini-desktop is reportedly going to cost around $400 when it arrives in the third quarter of the year. Designed for kiosks and digital signage setups, the weeny box has attracted so much interest from solder-wielding modders that the company expects it to go on general sale. The initial unit will include a Sandy Bridge Core i3, 4GB RAM and a 40GB SSD, while on the outside it'll come with three USB 2.0 ports and dual HDMI outputs. That high price might dampen the spirits of those hoping for an Intel-powered Arduino / Raspberry Pi, but we still expect to see it crop up in plenty of brilliant mods next year.

Intel's NUC mini-desktop said to cost around $400 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Eric Schmidt has said that Google will make cash available through its investment into Teach First to buy Raspberry Pi and Arduino units for British schoolchildren. He was at the UK's Science Museum to talk about Mountain View's partnership with the charity, which puts top university graduates into schools to teach disadvantaged kids. The Android-maker wrote a cheque to fund over 100 places on the scheme, aiming to get bright computer scientists to reintroduce engineering principles to pupils. Mr. Schmidt hoped that with the right support, kits like the Raspberry Pi would do for this generation what the BBC Micro did three decades ago.

Google pumps cash into UK classrooms, will buy Arduino, Raspberry Pi sets for kids originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 May 2012 05:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, we're pretty sure you've heard about the Raspberry Pi by now -- a $25 credit-card sized PC that brings ARM/Linux to the Arduino form factor. As a refresher, the system features a 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with an ARM11 CPU, a Videocore 4 GPU (which handles HD H.264 video and OpenGL ES 2.0) and 256MB RAM. The board includes an SD card slot, HDMI ouput, composite video jack, 3.5mm audio socket, micro-USB power connector and GPIO header. Model A ($25) comes with one USB port, while Model B ($35) provides two USB ports and a 100BaseT Ethernet socket. Debian is recommended, but Raspberry Pi can run most ARM-compatible 32-bit OSes.

This past weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 we ran into Eben Upton, Executive Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and took the opportunity to spend some quality time with a production board and to discuss this incredible PC. We touched upon the origins of the project (inspired by the BBC Micro, one of the ARM founders' early projects), Moore's law, the wonders of simple computers and upcoming products / ideas -- including Adafruit's Pi Plates and Raspberry Pi's own prototype camera add-on. On the subject of availability, the company expects that "there will be approximately 200,000 units in the field by the end of June". Take a look at our hands-on gallery below and our video interview after the break.

Gallery: Raspberry Pi hands-on

Continue reading Raspberry Pi hands-on and Eben Upton interview at Maker Faire (video)

Raspberry Pi hands-on and Eben Upton interview at Maker Faire (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 May 2012 06:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over at Engineer Blogs, I found out about another cool project for connecting computers up with the real world—the IOIO (pronounced yo-yo):  An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO.

Basically, it is a $50 IO board for an Android phone, using either USB or Bluetooth connection, controllable with a Java API from an Android 1.5 or later device.  It has a PIC24F microcontroller providing 48 I/O pins, which have the usual sorts of capabilities (PWM, I2C, SPI, …).  You can use it in much the same way you would use an Arduino, except that you need an Android device to talk to it.

This is a plus and a minus, as the Android phones come with a fair amount of compute power and some powerful software (like face recognition software), but they cost a lot also, and you wouldn’t want to tie up your phone in a dedicated project (a $25 Arduino board is cheaper to embed than a phone and a $50 IOIO board).

I don’t think that the Android phone+IOIO is quite as exciting as the $35 Raspberry Pi if you need cell-phone-level compute power, but it looks like a good way to make cell-phone-controlled gadgets.

Thanks to Mark Guzdial’s Computing Education blog, specifically this post, I recently found out about the Raspberry Pi, a Linux board that is retailing for $35, with 256Mb RAM, 2 USB ports, an Ethernet port, and both RCA and HDMI video output (no VGA though an adapter can be had for ).  The system on a chip they are using

is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.

…

The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.

This board seems to be at least 50 times as much processing and 8000 times as much memory as an Arduino for a similar price.  You need to add an SD card to boot off of (I presume with a Linux system on the card), which raises the price by another $15–35 depending on how big a flash card you get (I’m assuming that 16gB or 32gB is about the right size—a smaller drive would be much cheaper).

There appear to be 26 general-purpose I/O pins, so I can see this processor becoming quite popular for higher-end robotics.  With the ethernet connection, it may become popular for providing small LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PhP) servers, as long as everything can fit on the SD drive.  It has an audio-out port, but you’d have to use a USB microphone to get audio in.  The board can be powered over the USB line, or through a separate power port.

The default Linux is Fedora, but Debian and ArchLinux will also be supported.  The Linux can be downloaded and put on an SD, or the SD flash cards can be bought preloaded.

This looks like a potentially very useful educational toy—cheap enough to mess around with and easy to start over from scratch (just write a new copy of the Linux onto an SD card).  The only problem I can see is that Linux makes getting access to the I/O ports much harder than it needs to be, but I suspect that the developers have already written drivers and Python modules for accessing the I/O pins, so this may not be a problem.  They plan to make Python the main development language for the Raspberry Pi (Python is slow, but even with interpreter overhead the chip would still be faster than an Arduino), but any language that has a compiler for the ARMv6 should work.  I assume that Pyrex would be available for speeding up inner loops.

I may have to look into designing a motor shield for the Raspberry Pi, so that we can do robotics with Python programming!

Related articles

• In Depth: Raspberry Pi: everything you need to know (techradar.com)
• You can now run Arch & Debian Linux on a Raspberry Pi (zdnet.com)
• Raspberry Pi hits the market for $35 (cbsnews.com)
• Educators and Leaders Are Praising Low-Cost Raspberry Pi Devices (ostatic.com)
• Raspberry Pi (avc.com)
• Arch Linux now available for the Raspberry Pi $35 computer (liliputing.com)
• The $35 Raspberry Pi computer goes on sale (hazima.wordpress.com)
• $35 PC Sells Out in Minutes (mashable.com)
• Raspberry Pi is Ready to Buy! $35 Computer is so Popular it’s Crashing Websites with Sales (singularityhub.com)
• Reports: First Raspberry Pi Devices Sell Out Nearly Instantly (ostatic.com)