Didn't want to hijack SupG's thread


I bought a 16 gig SD card, an Atrix 4G LapDock, some cables, and the Pi-B with 512m Ram. I am into it for 120.00 now. The laptop dock I am converting for the pi was the biggest cost (50 bucks on ebay)

Here's why I spent that much...

That is pretty freaking sweet.
What distro do you plan on using, and what will you be using it for?

I am using the default raspberry debian distro.

2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian

Not to be a smart arse, but you say "here's why I spent so much", and the video is essentially about playing with the Male & Female ends of a cable(?) I don't see what the big deal is, about that device. Is it a gimmick, like the pet-rock, or can you string 20 of those things together (parallel), to get a Super fast computer?

It's a gimmick...like a pet rock, LS.

This is the kind of thing I'd love to tinker with when
I was a teen.... You can make a cheap media player I
suppose, or teach your kid to tinker maybe?

I think it's for some geeky fun.

Well when you buy a Raspberry Pi you get just this:



So you basically need to add an power adapter, a case (optional), a 2gig (Minimum) SD Card, a monitor, a keyboard and mouse.

So this Laptop Dummy dock provides power, an 11.6. screen, a keyboard and a mouse.

Now the pi can be said to be a lot of things, even a pet rock, if a pet rock had a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (The firmware includes a number of "Turbo" modes so that the user can attempt overclocking, up to 1 GHz, without affecting the warranty), VideoCore IV GPU, and 512MB ram.

Its primary aim is to provide a cheap computer that runs linux for educational purposes. It has a built in IDE for learning python and the current GCC compiler if you want to learn/program in C++.

Imagine being able to give every kid in a class a personal computer running linux for less than $1000-$2000 (for the whole class) they can actually use to learn with.

Yeah, that is pretty cool. And I can see at least high school students carrying some sort of laptop/tablet device soon rather than text books.

e-books are very popular in college now, and lots of learning being done on the web. I swear if I hear my instructor tell me to "Google it" one more time, I'm going to scream! LOL

I need to get a couple of these. I want to build a bunch of robots to make my life easier.

Speaking of which, I saw a project for a dog feeder I am going to try LOL

If you buy the Pi by itself, it is in the 30-40 dollar range (or Pound Sterling, I cannot recall) but as Helix bought it, it comes with all you need to have it running out of the box.

It is a great way to teach kids how to use a computer running Linux, how to program, or how to get your grandparents on the internet without getting infected by a ton of viruses.

Guess I'm having a hard time appreciating this thing because I learned how to program on one of these things:




The Motorola 6800 - Trainer (much cooler). Assembly language is too hard for kids today.

Good luck with your slice of Pi. heh.

I wish they would teach assembly, or even just C. They are teaching C# using .Net at my community college.

They still teach assembly at universities. My brother had to learn assembly (x86, I think) in one of his undergrad CS courses. Then he had to write an 8086 emulator in Java and run some asm objects on it.

I don't live near a University, Devry is much too expensive for 100% online. www.edX.org does have more large universities offering free online courses. I've viewed most of the lectures from Harvard's intro class CS50, and they do start with C, but have their own libraries.

Don't ya wish they would just throw open hood on those libraries first, before you have to use on them so you know what's possible?

I think there's a free version of MicroSoft's Assembler (MASM), somewhere on the net. I still have it someone where on one of my Drives, if anyone's interested. I probably still have Borlands Turbo C/CPP as well (both for DOS). Not to mention a ton of Assembly related articles & utilities and such.

@Crunch. If you want to look under the hood of a Library, I'd suggest trying to write a Low-level one yourself first. I think you'll be glad that someone else already has.