Big news from the Raspberry Pi front today – they have a manufacturing date. “The boards will be finished on February 20. Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month.”
Slightly bigger news is that they are also releasing the ARM datasheet for their SoC!! Us hobby oS guys can use that to port our favourite OS to this tiny device, I’m pretty pleased to be honest
The Broadcom datasheet is heavily butchered. Lots of important data removed.
True, it is butchered, but to even get this much out of Broadcom is nothing short of a miracle — given we’re talking about the company that driver developers joke “doesn’t want you to actually use their hardware”.
Hell, you can be building cards using their chips under contract and not get that much information out of them…
Ah for the good old days where EVERYTHING had complete implementation docs… You know, like a TRS-80 technical reference where you get the entire computers circuit diagrams AND copies of the major chips tech specs, right down to timing charts?
Edited 2012-02-07 13:46 UTC
With the device being so popular, hopefully the community can reverse engineer the missing pieces and produce their own data sheet. Really unfortunate it has to be this way though.
Too bad I just found a VIA C3 board + 1 GB + case & PSU for 50€… and it does just what I want.
It would be interesting to see some head-to-head benchmark.
Then there is the allwinner A10
http://nwlinux.com/allwinner-a10-cheaper-raspberry-pi/
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/news/
The hardware is much more capable than Raspberry PI
1.5GHz A8, MALI400MP, 1GB RAM
upd. Doh, I misread your post.
*the crap I wrote has been deleted*
Edited 2012-02-08 11:59 UTC
…which is just the SoC. Yeah, it seems much nicer specs-wise than the one used in R-Pi (to the point that the latter almost appears as an exercise in dumping some inept Broadcom chip, counting on some variant of local rallying around it by ~UK people), but the resulting (& nonexistent, misrepresented by yet another random blog) boards would end up fairly similar all around.
In the end, Arduino-like community, which appears to be forming around R-Pi, might be more than worth it by itself.
Edited 2012-02-14 23:32 UTC
I’ll buy one when they are out and have a play. I usually buy the HumbleIndyBundles to support the Linux?OSS communities. Will do the same with RasPie this even though I haven’t got a real use for it (yet)[shrug].
Install a Linux mini-server OS on an SD card, Something like this would fit the bill:
http://www.zentyal.com/
Yes, it can be had or zero cost.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=zentyal
Then plug in an ethernet network cable to your router, and also a external portable hard disk to a USB port or even better, a Sata port.
http://www.google.com/search?q=portable+hard+disk#q=portable+hard+d…
Spend a moment setting your router to give this device a fixed IP address on your LAN (normally done via specifying the MAC address of the device), and also setting up accounts on the server via the zentyal web interface, and hey presto … a small group server for, say, $125 outlay.
It would do as a very inexpensive file server, email server, groupware server and print queue server for a small group of client machines.
Edited 2012-02-08 04:04 UTC