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I assume it's really going to be an Astro Pi2 now.

DougieLawson wrote:I assume it's really going to be an Astro Pi2 now.

No. https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/5 ... 3978809344

DirkS wrote:

DougieLawson wrote:I assume it's really going to be an Astro Pi2 now.

No. https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/5 ... 3978809344

That makes sense. The military (NASA are a branch of the DoD) have always been slow with product certification and moving to new tech. That's why the Shuttle (STS) had to be retired in 2011, it was built on 20 year old hardware back in 1977 (first flight of Enterprise).

Hi guys, yep it will be a B+ that we fly. However you'll still be able to use an Astro Pi hat on a Pi 2 to develop code that can run on a B+.

Yeah, think of the extra weight of all those additional transistors

Well, it is going inside a fairly chunky 6061/6063 grade aluminium case too!

They don't like bare boards up there. Somewhere among the Space trivia I read geekily, I heard about a computer failure on the shuttle. They had four computers, all redundant, but apparently all in ONE box. Apparently a loose bit of solder had broken off, and as it was drifting about it caused separate computer failures in TWO of the computers. (At least I have assumed it was the one piece that caused the two failures.) Possibly this flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-9

They were also worried (seriously) about the potential for astronauts to injure themselves on the pokey bits. There has been a LOT of safety compliance work to get through. We'd hate for Tim Peake to lose an eye to zero-gravity GPIO pins.