I wholeheartedly agree. Their page now is at least magnitudes more informative than it was a few months ago--when I first saw a Raspberry Pi reference on HN.
I went to their page looking for an about link. I'm not sure if I found it or not, but either way, I left not knowing what it was actually about.
We anticipate the device will be available to the general public later in 2011 – we were hoping to hit the end of November, but right now December’s looking more likely.
I really, really hope I am wrong, but the first few batches will be woefully short of the actual demand.
Why?
No pre-orders to indicate real demand (Rasperry forums are more optimistic than an Amway convention).
No clue on what financing they have in place to handle the manufacturing.
I have a hard time believing they will do a run of 10000(need to find someone to front $200k+) boards, when the real demand is probably 100k+(at those $25/$35 price points).
What will happen they will have 1000 boards for sale early January and they will be gone in an instant (remember no pre-orders, means people will overwhelm their servers in a huge rush). Then we will wait another 2-3 months for a slightly bigger batch. Repeat until 2013.
Again, I hope I am wrong and hopefully someone at Broadcom who has experience with supply-chain is backing them.
While demand might be very high, the particular scenario you describe is not going to happen. Eben addresses the funding issue in this interview: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=281 The trustees will be putting up the money for the initial run themselves. One of the trustees is Pete Lomas, managing director of Norcott Technologies.
There are doubts about how open this project will be. I share that concern. But, I also give the guy credit for making the project at all. Maybe it will be more closed than I would like. If the project is a success and produces a lot of boards, then I expect real open source builds of software for it will follow from someone. As a start, I can't think of anything I would prefer to Linux and Python as a place to start. I sure want to buy a few of these boards to experiment with.
What's the point of discussing not-yet-released product (i.e. one can't buy it) without proper schematics (or maybe I just didn't found one?) nearly useless tiny PNG file with a PCB layout and no source code available?
Sure, tiny $25 board is cool. If it can be obtained. No point in discussing it further before they either ship it or release DIY manuals.
My thoughts exactly. Are you planning on blogging about your Raspberry Pi media player adventures when these things are finally released? I'd definitely be interested - huge potential here.
While it would require me setting up a blog, it would probably be worth it.
It could almost be a business venture, given the fact that an off the shelf media product is upwards of $100 here in aus, if you could create a decent linux media center experience for the device, and a nice case, you could flog it for waves hand about $80 per unit and be ahead (provided the mark-up took into consideration all your costs).
Would fly in the face of the educational/not-for-profit Raspberry Inc though.
It's not flying in the face of the idea of RaspPi, they are making a profit on each unit sold so want as many people to buy one as possible. The educational aspect of the foundation backed by the hacker community buying them up for their own purposes.
The initial 10k batch may be another matter. They are looking at putting a per buyer limit since demand will be so great.
We're on the same wavelength here. If you're interested in collaborating or just bouncing thoughts, shoot me an email (check profile) - I'd love to chat.
Because so much functionality is being packed on these SoC devices now. You literally hook these chips up to some RAM and Flash and add some I/O connectors of your choice, and you're in business.
That's pretty awesome, then. Because your other options are to stack the RAM on top of the chip like older OMAP parts, or put the RAM on the board and hope you get the circuit trace timing and impedences right.
If you don't have a compiler or documentation for the proprietary instruction set the GPU uses, what use is the source code to the binary blob that runs on it?
It's just possible you're underestimating the capability of a hundred thousand ten-year-olds with curiosity, spare time, and the potential for bragging rights.
That didn't stop nouveau, or r300 (which I was a part of). Given sufficient interest and time, it'll eventually get reverse-engineered, but I wish we had documentation or code, which speeds up the process greatly.
the idea of a credit card sized board, running open sourced code, to connect with peripherals is fantastic. but this project is going to disappoint. the guy works for broadcom which is how he got the smaller than minimum quantity of chips, so don't expect it to be repeated by anyone else. it's aim claims to be education, and people compare this to kit computers many years ago, but this is a far cry from that. this guy wants to steer you to use GNU/Linux and scripting languages like Python. no assembly programming. how can a kid learn about hardware without learning assembly? so much for education.
It's an ARM11 SoC running Linux, of course you can program in assembler. And ARM assembler is a very nice one to start with, many did due to Acorn's Archimedes home computer.
You can make that argument both ways - if you'd learned Fortran-77 and nothing newer, your knowledge would be obsolete as well.
Either way, you have the foundation, should you wish, to be able to bring it up to date without too much hassle.
I think you'd be surprised how simple an ARM actually is under the skin. Admittedly, it's not Z80-simple, but it's far, far removed from the x86/AMD64 monstrosities.
When i first heard about the Project i was impressed, good to know they won some award, but it is boring after a while as nothing is being shipped even after so many years, just hype, they should remove the 25$ tag till they ship it
The project only went 'public' a few months ago (I think http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9504208.s... was the first coverage). The 2006 prototype is simply evidence of the massive amount of commitment to the project shown by Eben and the trustees. It's far from just being hype. Alpha boards are with developers (I'm lucky enough to have one sitting on my desk) and they're hoping to start manufacture in the next few weeks.
I understand your scepticism, but look at the people behind the project. It's going to happen and it's going to be awesome. The launch this December is mainly targeted at the hacker and 'maker' community, with aims to target the educational market next year.
I am not the lucky one to have the development board on my desk , nor seen any timeline or product roadmap. But would happy to see a commercial launch soon.
Link to your blog for sure, but the home page should explain quickly what the project is and why I should care.