Eben's Slashdot Q&A is now live

14th of September 2011 by liz

Remember when we encouraged you to go to Slashdot last week, in case you wanted to ask Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi’s Director, any questions? The results have just been posted. Head on over to have a read. Any further questions can be asked in the comments below – I can’t guarantee he’ll be quite as assiduous as Gert has in the post further down the page about answering them, but I’ll do my best to prod him into it.

News Archives

- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011

Supported by

In the forums

texy, 5 minutes ago: Add-ons for sale • Re: Nokia Pi LCD + Switch Shield board…
Hi Julian, I can post some code that just sets up the hpio's, pull-downs, and reads the switches, but as Dan has stated,It probably won't help you in the long run Texy
peewee2, 8 minutes ago: CSI camera module • Re: Issue with getting camera to work
I think it's not as simple as a config problem.I have had my camera working for 3 days. I have had intermittent problems with mmal: mmal_vc_component_createI have raspistill running in response to a cgi script, it has been working fine,…
texy, 9 minutes ago: Add-ons for sale • Re: 1.8" TFT LCD Shield board
You can pm now!Texy
towolf, 11 minutes ago: Deutsch • Re: PI Camera Modul als Outdoor Webcam verwenden ;)
Prober mal "--exposure night", dann gibt’s abend noch bessere Bilder. Nachteile für tagsüber hab ich noch nicht festegestellt.Live streaming geht ziemlich gut, man muss eben den h264 Stream von raspivid per stdout in ffmpeg rein pipen und damit dann streamen.…
Engineer1, 12 minutes ago: Other projects • Re: Screenly OSE -- Digital Signage for the Raspberry…
Hello,Firstly, thank you for a very impressive piece of work. I have setup a Pi running Screenly OSE to display a long (2hr) movie in a continuous loop. I want to make sure that the system is reliable, but I…

Follow @Raspberry_Pi

On Twitter

pimoroni, 1 day ago
Got some lovely Raspberry Pi Swag? We'd love to see photos of you wearing it/using it etc! E-mail pics to swag@raspberrypi.org :-) Sheffield, UK
theuberchad, 1 day ago
Thanks to @Raspberry_Pi for the awesome camera http://t.co/423s2IAmem Winnipeg, MB
VXShare, 1 day ago
Just test deployed a @Raspberry_Pi as a malware crawler and indexer. All I had to add was an external HDD. Internet tube #1203437748.
disco_v8, 2 days ago
【拡散希望】もういってもいいでしょう(ﾟдﾟ)！ RaspberryPiの開発者、Ebenが大阪にも行くよ!!(5/27) http://t.co/XxxDLeGe7b 東京のBigJAMはいけないけど大阪なら!!という人は急いで申し込みしないと!! TOKYO

Friends of Pi

23 comments

David Riley on
September 15, 2011 at 12:18 am said:

I really liked his answers. It’s really good to see someone with an execution plan and the resources to pull this off running a project like this; so much the opposite of what’s happened with OLPC. I am so excited about this whole thing, you guys. Great work!

Comment ↓
rasz on
September 15, 2011 at 5:02 am said:

Reading the replies i noticed video output dillemas. Wouldnt HDMI2DVI cable just work? I was under the impression all HDMI sources supported legacy DVI signalling.

Comment ↓
- jamesh on
  September 15, 2011 at 9:35 am said:
  
  Yes it should work.
  
  Comment ↓
- Søren on
  September 15, 2011 at 12:10 pm said:
  
  The RPi only supports HDMI and composite video.
  
  HDMI is digital. Composite video is analog, but essentially only usable for TVs, not computer monitors. The dilemma is whether to support VGA for old analog computer monitors.
  
  DVI can carry both digital (HDMI) and analog (VGA) signals. While you can get a HDMI to DVI adapter, that doesn’t give you an analog VGA signal, if all you had was digital HDMI signal to begin with.
  
  Comment ↓
  - jamesh on
    September 15, 2011 at 12:19 pm said:
    
    It’s a simply plug issue to convert HDMI to DVI-D.
    
    You cannot get a plug that converts HDMI to DVI-A (which contains an analog stream).
    
    If you monitor has DVI input, it’s almost certain to be DVI-D, so an HDMI to DVI-D plug or cable is all you need.
    
    Comment ↓
thomasb on
September 15, 2011 at 9:57 am said:

I see that you plan on using C and Python for teaching languages. I think the device could be a trojan horse to teach other interesting paradigms to people (including children).

In particular, I think functional programming (OCaml, Haskell, Scala) are not as known as they deserve, and that the future may see more of this kind going mainstream (Clojure, …).

OCaml is used to teach (functional) programming to high-school student a lot in France, and I would love to see an ocaml port on the Raspberry Pi. This would help people learn early about type safety and this kind of stuff.

Nevertheless, keep up the good work!

Comment ↓
- liz on
  September 15, 2011 at 10:00 am said:
  
  Obviously, we can’t port everything that’s out there; we have a fairly small team working on getting stuff ready for launch, and there’s a whole world of software out there. The hope is (and it appears to be a sensible one, given what’s going on in our forums and elsewhere) that the community will start porting things they really want to see Raspberry Pi onto the device once they have their own boards. We’d love to see software like this on Raspi – I’m sure someone, somewhere will be excited enough by the idea to work on a port.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Andrew Minor on
    September 15, 2011 at 12:17 pm said:
    
    It would be useful, though, to have a selection of software or documentation “products” that carried Raspberry Pi branding. They could be developed by third parties in conjunction with the RasPi team and form part of the “official” package available to buyers.
    
    I think the key thing here is that the “official” manual would contain in depth and detailed documentation on the capabilities and limitations of the hardware from the outset and would be the “go to” (or maybe GOTO!) reference book for low level information.
    
    I guess that this doesn’t have to be available immediately (and isn’t likely to be) but certainly made available within four to six months after release, perhaps.
    
    Naturally software, hardware, documentation and educational materials would be made available through other providers later, just as they have with every other personal computer.
    
    Comment ↓
    - liz on
      September 15, 2011 at 2:15 pm said:
      
      Sure – and we’ll be hosting torrents here of software stacks for people to download. We won’t be selling any of this because it’s all open source. We are not going to be developing educational materials ourselves; we’d merely be duplicating the work than an awful lot of other people have done already.
      
      Comment ↓
- Nathan Liddle on
  September 15, 2011 at 9:08 pm said:
  
  Python is a capable language for functional programming, most people use it imperatively, but that doesn’t make it any less functional.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Thomas on
    September 16, 2011 at 1:05 pm said:
    
    Python is indeed capable of functional programming.
    
    However, I missed my point: I should have emphasized how valuable a statically typed programming language is, for teaching. The functional languages I mentionned all have in common the fact that they are statically typed, with a powerful type system. (Less silly bugs = more fun)
    
    However, I think that it is up to us, to provide support for these on the Raspberry Pi, if we really think that it is the way programming should be taught. So I am really looking forward to buying the device, and start porting OCaml on it.
    
    Comment ↓
- David Riley on
  September 15, 2011 at 9:16 pm said:
  
  It’s just running Linux; you should be able to run anything you can compile and run on Linux on ARM. I should imagine any of the bevy of open-source language interpreters should build with no problem on this!
  
  If it’s running Debian or a derivative, I should imagine it would be as simple as “apt-get install ” as long as said interpreter is in Apt built for ARM (and as long as you’re running on the B board with Ethernet; for the A board, you could always get the source package onto the SD or a USB stick and build it).
  
  Comment ↓
- jamesh on
  September 15, 2011 at 9:57 pm said:
  
  Just out of interest I tried installing the languages you mentioned on my prototype. The only one not in the Debian Arm repo was Haskell. All the others were there, although I am only fully installing OCaml (waiting for it now to complete install – takes a while to unpack)
  
  So it looks like most of the languages you mentioned are ready to go ‘out of the box’.
  
  James
  
  Comment ↓
  - jamesh on
    September 15, 2011 at 10:07 pm said:
    
    And managed to try OCaml before bed and it seem to work – well, I typed ocaml, and got this…
    
    jamesh@raspi-jamesh:~$ ocaml Objective Caml version 3.11.2
    #
    
    Comment ↓
    - Thomas on
      September 16, 2011 at 1:15 pm said:
      
      That sounds promising, indeed.
      
      Comment ↓
  - jamesh on
    September 16, 2011 at 7:34 am said:
    
    And here is Scala (wasn’t particularly fast though)
    
    jamesh@raspi-jamesh:~$ scala Welcome to Scala version 2.7.7final (OpenJDK Zero VM, Java 1.6.0_18). Type in expressions to have them evaluated. Type :help for more information.
    scala>
    
    And Clojure..
    
    jamesh@raspi-jamesh:~$ clojure Clojure 1.1.0 user=> help java.lang.Exception: Unable to resolve symbol: help in this context (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0) user=>
    
    Comment ↓
ottocool on
September 16, 2011 at 5:26 pm said:

Hi,

I was quite disappointed when i heard that Ubuntu can’t be supported, so I thought why don’t we collect some money in order to support the development of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi?

Comment ↓
- jamesh on
  September 16, 2011 at 6:59 pm said:
  
  It’s not a question of Raspi supporting Ubuntu, but Ubuntu supporting the Armv6 architecture which they have dropped. Since Debian (and other distros) still support Armv6 there are plenty of alternatives that provide pretty much the same functionality.
  
  Comment ↓
Mike Jans on
September 16, 2011 at 8:55 pm said:

Im a realy big fan of Ubuntu… but only for Home computer….

Im much more intrested in using TinyCore Linux on this little beast ;=) because the distro is only 10MB in size and has a ultra easy package manager..

greeeeeetz
good work

Comment ↓
Rosia Nicolae on
September 19, 2011 at 4:00 pm said:

Will it have Linux drivers for SPI and I2C ?

Comment ↓
- jamesh on
  September 19, 2011 at 4:14 pm said:
  
  It can use the standard Linux SPI and I2C drivers, so yes.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Rosia Nicolae on
    September 19, 2011 at 5:41 pm said:
    
    GREAT!
    
    Comment ↓
Pingback: resumen del robotito (September, 20th) — zanadoria.com

Buy a Pi!

News Archives

Supported by

In the forums

On Twitter

Friends of Pi