The videos are starting to come in from partners we’ve sent alpha boards to at a very satisfying rate. Here’s Raspberry Pi booting QMLviewer on Mer, which is an open Maemo platform. (You’ll notice the kernel boot sequence looks a bit different from the Debian install you’ve seen in previous videos.)
QMLviewer boots here in 24 seconds – not bad! Thanks to the guys at MeeGo for their work on this; we hope to see some more from them in the coming weeks.
Our friends at The Hybrid Group managed, as it turns out, to beat us by a day in being the first people to demo an alpha board in the USA last week. KidsRuby is what it sounds like – a Ruby for kids – and it’s running beautifully on the Raspberry Pi. This is exactly the sort of application we want to see on the device, and we’re really pleased to see it up and running. It looks like there will be some optimisation for speed before we launch, but what’s there already is very useable.
Ron Evans from the Hybrid Group did a presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in California, where the Raspberry Pi was rolled out at the end (to a very encouraging ripple of applause). Unfortunately the video is too big for us to embed here – if you want to watch it, go to the conference website. The Raspberry Pi makes its appearance at 17:08, but the whole talk is well worth your time.
Many thanks to www.geek.com, who took this video (we got some too, but Eben prefers the angle they took theirs at, which doesn’t make him look as if the microphone is a really bad moustache). It’s pretty long at nearly 19 minutes, but we hope you watch at least a bit of it. It’s a demo presentation, where Eben shows Raspberry Pi running 1080p video, and the Quake 3 demo you’ve already seen here, alongside some talk about what the foundation’s doing, what the board does, and a Q&A session. It was really satisfying to see the Live Stage tent fill up for the talk to the point where there was standing room only.
I’ve got some more video from the day that I’ll put on the site later. A huge thank you to everyone who came to New York to see us, especially our board members and A, who came all the way from Pittsburgh just to have a look at a Raspberry Pi.
Most of all, I was really, really encouraged to meet some of the kids we’re aiming the device at – some of the day’s most intelligent and thoughtful questions came from the under-13s. There are some incredible ideas floating around out there for projects schools can do with the boards; we really want to see some of the younger people who are interested in Raspberry Pi relaying the news that we’re launching soon to the relevant teachers at their schools. I didn’t get everyone’s name, but I’d like to call out Andrew Katz in particular, an Arduino hacker with some very cool ideas, who had his own stand near ours, and who wants a Raspberry Pi for his birthday. We should be launching in time for Andrew to get one – I hope a hefty number of you will be buying one too!
If you were at Maker Faire and took pictures or video, please feel free to leave them in the comments here or email them to me at liz@raspberrypi.org. I’d love to see if anyone managed to get a picture of me with my mouth shut…
(ETA: there are some more pictures from the day here on the forum – thanks, @PaulDow!)
Just a quick note to let you know that Eben and I have been travelling across the United States from Maker Faire to meeting to conference room to meeting over the weekend and today (we are racking up air miles at a frankly unsustainable rate). I haven’t been in front of a computer much because we’ve been on the move, so I haven’t been able to get through the 600-odd emails sitting in my in-box or to sit down and edit the video from Maker Faire yet.
I’m in Arizona for a few days at the moment (for non-Pi-related business), and I’ll be travelling from here to Vegas, California, Vancouver and back to CA again over the next couple of weeks, so updates may not be quite as frequent as usual, and it may take me a little longer than normal to answer your emails. I hope to have some video up in the next 24 hours – please be patient with me, because the jet lag and general fatigue is so bad it feels as if my eyeballs are effervescing slightly.
Just a reminder for those of you near NYC – Eben and I will be at Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science tomorrow, and Eben will be giving a talk about Raspberry Pi on the live stage at 5pm. Come and say hi – we’re very friendly!
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.
A few days ago, Ringo, a newly minted member of our forums, posted this:
As an Electronics Engineer i’m interested with in the way the PCB has been routed and what constraints/difficulties you had during the layout process, try to fit everything on board (i’m not even refering to the updated credit card size which blows my mind how you guys can make it that small!!). I’m also interested in the power requirements and high speed digital routing (such as HDMI). Care to shed any light on this?
Most of our technically inclined readers are experienced on the software side of things, but have had less exposure to hardware engineering. Hardware’s always been a bit of an arcane art to me – I can solder things messily to breadboard, and I’ve helped Eben etch simple PCBs in our kitchen, but that’s about the limit of my knowledge, and it seems a lot of people are in a similar position. But this hardware stuff is fascinating, and Ringo’s not alone in having questions about how on earth it all fits together.
We thought the best way to structure an interview with the hardware team would be through a community Q&A. Leave questions for the guys below, and I’ll sort through for the best ones, which will be answered by Pete Lomas and Gert van Loo. Pete is MD of Norcott Technologies. He’s one of Raspberry Pi’s trustees and our Operations Director, and is responsible for the overall hardware design and implementation of the final board. Gert is a Senior Principal Engineer at Broadcom in Cambridge, and is volunteering for Raspberry Pi in his non-work time. He’s responsible for the schematic design of the alpha boards, and he’s working alongside Pete on the final board.
Please leave questions for Pete and Gert in the comments below!
Just a quick note to let you know that we’ve found and squished the WordPress bug that was stopping new registrations from working. Come and have a chat in the forums if you haven’t already – we’d love to see you there!
Some more video for you today, this time not filmed by us (the camera announced that the only SD card I’d brought was corrupted 1.10 mins into Eben’s talk), but by Andy Piper, one of the conference attendees, whom I had a very enjoyable time talking to. Andy filmed this on his phone while I was busy pressing the open-source flesh – thanks very much for putting the video on YouTube, Andy!
What you’re seeing in the video is the Raspberry Pi running h.264 video at 1080p. (We didn’t have the audio hooked up so we could talk to people while it was running.) At the point this video was taken, this demo had been running for about 8 hours. I was busily getting attendees to feel the SoC, to emphasise the fact that it only draws 1W, staying surprisingly cool.
A couple of other notes for today. First of all, we’re aware we’re having sign-up problems with the message board and mailing list. This is because of a shonky MailPress update, which we’re trying to fix at the moment. And secondly, this week’s Slashdot Q&A is with our very own Eben Upton, so if there’s a burning question you’d like to ask him, head over to Slashdot and leave a post.
Another day, another demo. Eben and I will be demonstrating the Raspberry Pi at Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science next month, and Eben will be giving a presentation about the project. You can come along and play with an alpha board yourself – and we’d love to meet you and have a chat.
Tickets are $20 for adults, and less for students, kids and seniors (babies can come for free, but I have to admit that I’m yet to meet one who’s expressed an interest in doing anything other than chewing on a Raspberry Pi) if you buy online before September 8. Prices rise a little after that. Let us know if you’re coming. We’re really looking forward to it!