We have so many options for cheap little ARM boards now a days.
As far as I can tell none of them existed before the Raspberry Pi. I did a lot of searching for ARM boards for some projects a bit before the Pi was ever heard of, one of the best I came up with was the IGEP board from ISEE: http://www.isee.biz/products/processor-boards/igepv2-board That is an excellent board but it will still set you back nearly 200 euros. (You still won't do much better if your customers demand am industrial temperature spec (down to -40C).
I might posit that the appearance of the Raspberry Pi and the surprisingly overwhelming demand it generated actually inspired all the recent market activity in ultra cheap ARM devices, like the Cubieboard, VIA APC etc etc. In the case of the HackBerry that link is blatent http://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry A10 Developer Board
I think you will find that the Pi is still the cheapest, 16 quid is amazing still, and when your target audience is 12 year olds in Britain then cheap is very important.
Of course, you are right, getting down to that price may have meant cutting a corner many for some folks applications. That's the trade off they made and it seems to have worked out about a 100 times better (in sales numbers) than they ever imagined it would.
The Beagleboard, the Pandaboard, and the BeagleBone pioneered the way before Raspberry Pi.
I really liked the Pandaboard, but couldn't seem to get one sent to Taiwan without a lot of paperwork.
Cubieboard may never be as successful as the Raspberry Pi in created a name and a following, but the boards are generically availabe inside video bses that provide an enclosure, a remote control, and the power supply for less than $100USD. These can be reflashed easily with Ubuntu Linux or Android with the extra RAM, the Remote control interface, and the SATA hard disk interface.
When have you ever experiences -40 degree C?. I am no sure that the Pi market target was really 12 year olds, or those with the mind of a 12 year old.
I am always looking for something that really will stand up as an installed device.. not just a breadboard gadget.
It seems the window of opportunity is closing on these as the newer ARMs SOC chips have less total features and seemed to focus on what the big buyers want rather than providing the all and everything approach to System-on-a-chip.
The Beagleboard, the Pandaboard, and the BeagleBone pioneered the way before Raspberry Pi.
Exactly.
Beagleboard - $125
Pandaboard - $182 (@Digikey)
Beagle Bone - $89 (No HDMI)
They are not anywhere in the same league price wise.
Beagle Bone Black - $45
Are now we are getting closer, this is a very recent addition to the range and still twice the price of a Pi.
When have you ever experiences -40 degree C?
Personally I have not. I think the worst I have experienced is -28C
But when you are controlling or monitoring things outdoors in remote locations your equipment is subject to huge temperature variations. This is Finland. Minus 30C is common. The lowest recorded here is -51.5 C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records
I am no sure that the Pi market target was really 12 year olds, or those with the mind of a 12 year old.
Perhaps 12 years old is pushing the point a bit but certainly the Pi was created for youngsters in the UK. So as to restore some of the hacking possibilities they had back in the day of C64's etc.
Regarding the 12 year old on the Raspberry Forum..
Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments, "Honor thy father and mother"?
Kids don't need one of everything provided on demand by their parents.
I presume the kid is a computer geek because he already has one or more computers. If he really wants one, summer is here.. mow somebody's lawn for cash.
Learning to provide for oneself is an extremely important skill.
...the Raspberry Pi cut a few corners too tightly for me. It never had to be so ridiculously small, and I dislike the power distribution set up.
This is the "power distribution set up" I use. It was just over $3, came with the connector you see, supplies up to 3A with great regulation, and accepts anything from 6-23V.
Regarding the 12 year old on the Raspberry Forum..
Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments, "Honor thy father and mother"?
Kids don't need one of everything provided on demand by their parents.
I presume the kid is a computer geek because he already has one or more computers. If he really wants one, summer is here.. mow somebody's lawn for cash.
Actually, he did say he would pay for it himself, he has the cash, his mom simply would not allow him to possess one.
My sister-in-law would not allow me to give a computer to my nephew when he was nine. Some folks thing certain technology is not appropriate for kids. On the other hand we observe that often the best engineers were the ones that played with thermite when they were in middle school. Go figure.
...6 hours just to download and install SimpleIDE related sources.
There is no "just" about it. To use SimpleIDE with C you need GCC and that is huge. Fetching those sources from google code can be very slow in on a PC. Google code is just very slow sometimes. Of course you then need to compile all of that. Last time I compiled GCC it took 12 hours! This is not the sort of thing you would expect normal people to be doing on a Pi (or anywhere for that matter).
...Pi ...is more of a nail, when I was expecting a hammer.
Hardly the Pi's fault. It's specifications are clearly laid out.
I don't think the Pi can possibly serves it's intended purpose very well...I think it will fail to educate kids very much.
Hang around the Pi forums and keep up with the news and you will se how wrong that is.
...it might have an important place in the transmigration of people to Linux and to ARM chip sets
Yes. Openening peoples eyes to that fact that there is more to computing than Intel and Windows. There will be a generation growing up wondering how we managed to use such limiting systems for so long.
If you look at the educational needs of the developing world..the really needy of this world....charity..can't imagine how a kid could afford a PI....
Ah now I understand where you are comming from. You have assumed that the purpose of the Pi and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is to bring computers to the worlds poor, perhaps like the famouse "One Laptop Per Child" project. This is not so.
The raison d'etre of the Pi is more like this:
It was noticed that the number of applicants to British universities to study computer science had fallen dramatically over five or more years. Also the kids getting into the universities were comming with less and less computer skills. In the past they would already know how to program often in more than one language, including assembler. The new intakes had had to be taugh computer programming from scratch before they could even start of the actual computer science study.
The speculation was that young kids of time gone by were brought up around computers like C64, the BBC computer and the host of others that were around at that time. Those guys gettingt to uni had been hacking on their machines for years before. The newer generation lived in a world of game consoles that were not programmable or PC's that were not programmable because "dad would be mad if I broke it".
Conclusion was that to fix the sorry state university entrants a replacement for the C64's and Beebs of the day should be provided. It had to be cheap eanough that kids could get hold of them like any other toy and it did not matter if they broke them. It had to be standalone, useable without taking over the family PC.
And so the Pi was born. Not to satisfy some huge and noble goal like providing computers to the starving masses of the world. But to fix the ignorance of UK school kids and attract more of them into CS education and technology in general, for the benifit of UK universities and the future of the UK ecconomy.
I bought a book from the founder, the book spent more than half of its pages just explaining how to get a Pi operating.
...but getting a serial link to stop was impossible, regardless of how far and wide I looked.
I guess a question to the Pi forum would have that fixed. Much like Propeller problems get resolved here. Reboot should be the last resort.
When I compare the experience with the PI to the experience of getting a Propeller up and running, the differences are startling.
Yep, one is a full up computer running a multi user operating system and one is a micro-controller. I would hope they are different. They are both incredibly easy though.
Trying to teach kids C on a Pi is a waste of time... teach them C on a Propeller and they will eventually control their world.
Why? For sure the Prop is what you want for real-time control of real things. But the Pi does have some capability that way as well. Besides I think there is a lot of scope for Propeller-Pi. Consider a robot project with a Pi for brains, networking and storage linked to a Prop for the low level I/O.
P.S. If anyone needs propgcc ready to run on the Pi I can put up copy somewhere.
The drop in applications to British university computer programs might have followed a trend in the USA.
Simply put, it is almost impossible to get a good entry level job as there has been an oversupply of graduates to the marketplace. Even a Phd in Computer Science doesn't really guarantee a stable career. Contract programing on a freelance basis has take over.
This cycle has been seen in Engineering degrees as well. There just tend to be cycles of demand in particular educational majors as the public believes certain disciplines will provide a bright fast-track future, and then the bubble bursts and only the best and the brightest find a home.
I suspect on can bypass a lot of woes by applying a computer or engineering education in military service as a way to establish a resume advantage. But the average degree is not going to generate the kind of success that it is expected to do so.
Add to that the failure to recognize IT / Computing as an important part of the enterprise. In fact, the Lean IT movement happening right now in Europe is attempting to spread that message, taking the lean thinking model common to higher end manufacturing and applying it to IT. This will favor the college grads as it takes the baseline expectations up to a level where some higher level planning and working with the business actually is seen as enabling, not some cost center to be marginalized to the highest degree possible.
(The idea of a cost center vs profit center is probably one of the more damaging MBA type thinking models there is, and that's a discussion for another time, place and day)
The move to massively centralize IT, diluting it down to some basic common denominator does make it cheap, but it also rubs off the shiny bits that can really make people and things move to compete! And it ignores the value of education and experience, favoring more basic skills.
And that comes back to the "who" and it's important to understand who values this stuff and who just needs a monkey.
It became very obvious to me that the students from Asia that were headed west for university studies were in high demand as they pay the highest tuition in many cases.
And so, as the decline of the 'baby boom' generation going to university occurred, universities were more than willing to look the other way about internal quality control issues in order to make financial ends meet. A foreign student getting a degree from an esteemed university might not have to pass as high standards, just because that student is 'going home' and will not be an obvious embarrassment to the university.
And then there has been the internet providing services that write papers for students.
The list of issues goes on and on.
But Taiwan has one of the highest Phd per capita ratios and most have struggled with a good career path.
There was a time when a Bachelors secured a good living, then it was a Masters, and then a Phd. Now I tell my students that two Masters (with one in Business Admin or Accounting) are likely to be the only solution. Having a Phd often means getting passed over as too much education.
I currently have 5 of them 3V2 and 2V1 I use them mostly on my local network defined as a LAN of less than 25 nodes. Right now there are 3 that are active.
1. my NAS running samba and nfs hosting a 500GB USB drive serving 36GB of music and 22GB of pictures along with several working shares such as nightly backups.
2. my local net LAMP server which hosts my open2300 weather station and a mysql DB of music to provide click and play. I have not figured out how to categorize the pictures or that would be another DB.
3. DNS, DHCP, and Ntp server for the local net not that I need it.
Projects that I have completed but are not active right now include
Web Cam server, Print Server, Digital Frame, and X10 controller.
I also built a Wireless Access Point which I use when traveling. It has a huge SD card and serves my music and pictures and operates as a wireless hotspot anywhere with or without internet.
In progress is the top level controller for a robot with the prop doing all the hardware interfacin
g.
I don't understand any of this talk about "failure to recognize IT / Computing" and what degree you might want for what cushy life style you expect.
When I got to uni in 1975 only 10% of the population did so. You were not there to learn how to get a "good job". You were there because you had a passion to study what was on offer. Never mind where it leads. In my case was physics. Turned out that despite my strenuous efforts to get a place there I was not going to be a physist of any kind. My peers were a lot smarter and passionate about it than I was. However I will always be grateful I had the opportunity to mix with those guys.
Recently I have been watching some videos from CS courses in Berkeley. Shite, this is not about teaching the language of the day, C++, or Java or whatever. It's about computer science. The fundamentals of computing. What a comuter can or cannot do. Actually you don't even need a computer to study the mathematics of that.
If you are going to spend three or four years of your young life in university studying such things you should have a passion for that above all else.
If you are looking for a high paying job, go to trade school. Or like Bill Gates just get on with it.
I'm not a writer for any trade journal. All my experience is based on my own children and their cousins. Engineering runs in our family, and every last engineer or engineering student I know has a great job. If there is a glut in engineering, it is in some other geographical area or among the academically challenged.
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When I got to uni in 1975 only 10% of the population did so. You were not there to learn how to get a "good job". You were there because you had a passion to study what was on offer. Never mind where it leads. In my case was physics. Turned out that despite my strenuous efforts to get a place there I was not going to be a physist of any kind. My peers were a lot smarter and passionate about it than I was. However I will always be grateful I had the opportunity to mix with those guys.
Our paths have been remarkably similar, Heater! I had intended to major in either English or Philosophy but ended up declaring a major in Physics without ever having taken a college physics class. (English, philiosophy, and calculus classes convinced me that I was more suited to a technical field.) But I never intended to become a physicist. I just totally enjoyed the class- and lab-work, and with a student:teacher ratio of about 2:1 (small midwest liberal arts college), it was a total blast. But the computing bug bit me hard, and I ended up doing graduate work in CS. Several of my fellow Physics majors, though, went on to get doctorates in Physics.
Amy happens to have hit the spotlight having hit the Raspberry Pi wave but I'm sure the Parallax guys could tell you stories of other youngsters who got enthused with Parallax devices.
Engineering runs in our family, and every last engineer or engineering student I know has a great job. If there is a glut in engineering, it is in some other geographical area or among the academically challenged. .
The STEM effort talks about a shortage of Engineers. There are many engineering jobs. There are still engineers without jobs. Why?
The is SHORTAGE of highly qualified engineers that will work for nothing. These would be new grads, H1 visa types.
There are great engineering jobs out there, but engineers tend to stay in those jobs, particularly in this economy.
Experienced engineers are perceived as too expensive. If your over 30, employers are less interested. This is not limited to engineering, the effect is reported in many fields where experience is in fact important, but obtaining that experience is a long term investment. If one is in an area where there were large layoff in an engineering field, it remains difficult to find one of the few available jobs.
I'm sure the Parallax guys could tell you stories of other youngsters who got enthused with Parallax devices.
I just discovered that one of the precocious fourth graders in my LittleRobots class is actually a third grader. Age has less impact, the ability to read and follow instructions seems to be the limiting factor. If one assumes the students are going to succeed, and one helps them until they do, they succeed. Its a hard-to-miss target.
Amy was asked about what age is a good age to begin learning to program in the interview I linked to. Her reply was that age does not matter, "Anyone who can read and type can program".
Pi is awesome for learning Linux, especially at the command line without the bother of a dedicated PC or messing with VMs. Super-easy setup. Internet is just plug and play, plug into router and go. Swap out cheap SDHC cards for experimenting. Incredible graphics, but the GUI is painfully slow to the point of being unusable (for my taste), but that forces you to "man-up" and learn Linux at the command line. SSH is super-easy, so easy to run head-less.
Looking into setting up webserver (NGINX) and some GPIO. Tons of decent online support, (Like Prop, not quite as good!)
We have the RPi as the linux box for the build and test automation. A custom Go program (GoTerm) on the linux side talks to the prop over usb, and the linux box provides number crunching, long term processing, and communication services, and terminal services to the prop. The prop does the realtime application. For less than the cost of a spinneret, we have all the functionality, plus a full OS linux box.
Sal is also working on massive number crunching using the J language, this should be fast even on the RPi.
Interesting, how does the Go part work on the Pi? Source?
@JordanC Clark: I dl'd the ignition demo, it asks for login/pwd, pls advise. Tnx.
Go is a compiled language. You can install it's compiler and stuff from apt.
# apt-cache search golang
golang - Go programming language compiler - metapackage
golang-dbg - Go programming language compiler - debug files
golang-doc - Go programming language compiler - documentation
golang-go - Go programming language compiler
golang-mode - Go programming language - mode for GNU Emacs
golang-src - Go programming language compiler - source files
# sudo apt-get install golang-go
I was looking into Go on the Pi for building a means of streaming data collected from a Propeller out over the network. Amazingly I found out it was horrible slow. Slower than using JavaScript under Node.js. I could see it was Go's garbage collection causing the problem, the data flow would stall and stutter visibly as it cleaned it self up.
You can read up on my installation on the IA Forums. The SD image I made is there as well. Post any insights or improvements over there, so we don't clutter this thread any more than than necessary.
Interesting, how does the Go part work on the Pi? Source?
We have Go working for linux in general, install as heater shows. The RPi is not going to be the fastest linux box on the block, unless your block has very slow linux boxes.
The way it works is using a "channels" implementation (Google call it Go Channels) which may or may not be similar to CSP channels from CAR Hoare. In any case, Go and Propforth use the same channel protocol, and we can get a whole bunch of channels talking fast, up to the limits of the physical link. Which is actually useless unless you need 32 channels talking on one phyiscal wire. We can have each cog talking on one or more channels to logfiles, process scripts, etc, and make a whole bunch of stuff happen at once in an organized way. It how we do autometed build, logging, automated test, and results checking. On a linux workstation it moves right along, but on a RPi the idea is to start it off and just let it run over night. So we don't care if its slow, as long as the main workstation is not tied up. All this is in the propforth download, in the development directory, including all source. But the hard bits are not very well documented.
[ ... ] Both RPi's are waiting till I get around to getting the camera and start in on OpenCV. The RPi doing vision and the prop doing control (linked by propforth and Go of course) will be unstoppable,
Any luck, Prof Braino ? openCV's can be a real pain to get working correctly. (I ended up using MATLAB on a project instead one time before.) Was trying to figure out which way to go on a new, little project. One way is using a Prop and Hanno's Viewport as it has openCV nicely built in. Versus using a Pi + the camera the Pi folks offer now too.
However, I'd like it to be portable, remote, and unconnected to a laptop / box. The Pi on the one hand is a bit hungry @750 mA (+ the cam.), and, on the other, I'm unsure if implementing this with a Prop standalone will work. So I'm kind of in a bind.
I was surprised how difficult it is to search for info on how a Prop might be used to get images onto an SDCard ... any suggestions / links ? Thanks!
BTW, it's great to see you all still so active and helpful.
Any luck, Prof Braino ? openCV's can be a real pain to get working correctly.
Hey Howard
I'm still finishing up a robot class, but the RPi + Camera + openCV is planned to be in the bot add-ons. The task will be for each bot to find it's builder by face recognition.
At this point, my C guy is busy and I try to leave the tough parts to the experts. But as the camera makes its way into the wild I imagine there will be more examples to borrow from.
I currently have 5 of them 3V2 and 2V1 I use them mostly on my local network defined as a LAN of less than 25 nodes. Right now there are 3 that are active.
1. my NAS running samba and nfs hosting a 500GB USB drive serving 36GB of music and 22GB of pictures along with several working shares such as nightly backups.
2. my local net LAMP server which hosts my open2300 weather station and a mysql DB of music to provide click and play. I have not figured out how to categorize the pictures or that would be another DB.
3. DNS, DHCP, and Ntp server for the local net not that I need it.
Projects that I have completed but are not active right now include
Web Cam server, Print Server, Digital Frame, and X10 controller.
I also built a Wireless Access Point which I use when traveling. It has a huge SD card and serves my music and pictures and operates as a wireless hotspot anywhere with or without internet.
In progress is the top level controller for a robot with the prop doing all the hardware interfacin
g.
What is the difference between a V2 and a V1?
answer -> V2 has 2 mounting holes. Both of mine are V2
What software did you use for one to be a Wireless Access Point? What transceiver?
Though when compared to some other devices out there the price/performance & features isn't tops....the educational opportunities that grew up around this thing are amazing!
The v1 also has only half the ram of the v2. I am also told that the holes in the v2 are NOT mounting holes too much pressure on them will cause shorts.
I used the standard raspian image with the edimax USB dongle, I also used the tenda dongle successfully. The ability to become a hotspot is all in the network configuration files just Google it there are several sites with tutorials other than that my app is just a standard nas with samba and NFS configured
Comments
As far as I can tell none of them existed before the Raspberry Pi. I did a lot of searching for ARM boards for some projects a bit before the Pi was ever heard of, one of the best I came up with was the IGEP board from ISEE: http://www.isee.biz/products/processor-boards/igepv2-board That is an excellent board but it will still set you back nearly 200 euros. (You still won't do much better if your customers demand am industrial temperature spec (down to -40C).
I might posit that the appearance of the Raspberry Pi and the surprisingly overwhelming demand it generated actually inspired all the recent market activity in ultra cheap ARM devices, like the Cubieboard, VIA APC etc etc. In the case of the HackBerry that link is blatent http://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry A10 Developer Board
I think you will find that the Pi is still the cheapest, 16 quid is amazing still, and when your target audience is 12 year olds in Britain then cheap is very important.
Of course, you are right, getting down to that price may have meant cutting a corner many for some folks applications. That's the trade off they made and it seems to have worked out about a 100 times better (in sales numbers) than they ever imagined it would.
I really liked the Pandaboard, but couldn't seem to get one sent to Taiwan without a lot of paperwork.
Cubieboard may never be as successful as the Raspberry Pi in created a name and a following, but the boards are generically availabe inside video bses that provide an enclosure, a remote control, and the power supply for less than $100USD. These can be reflashed easily with Ubuntu Linux or Android with the extra RAM, the Remote control interface, and the SATA hard disk interface.
When have you ever experiences -40 degree C?. I am no sure that the Pi market target was really 12 year olds, or those with the mind of a 12 year old.
I am always looking for something that really will stand up as an installed device.. not just a breadboard gadget.
It seems the window of opportunity is closing on these as the newer ARMs SOC chips have less total features and seemed to focus on what the big buyers want rather than providing the all and everything approach to System-on-a-chip.
Beagleboard - $125
Pandaboard - $182 (@Digikey)
Beagle Bone - $89 (No HDMI)
They are not anywhere in the same league price wise.
Beagle Bone Black - $45
Are now we are getting closer, this is a very recent addition to the range and still twice the price of a Pi. Personally I have not. I think the worst I have experienced is -28C
But when you are controlling or monitoring things outdoors in remote locations your equipment is subject to huge temperature variations. This is Finland. Minus 30C is common. The lowest recorded here is -51.5 C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records Perhaps 12 years old is pushing the point a bit but certainly the Pi was created for youngsters in the UK. So as to restore some of the hacking possibilities they had back in the day of C64's etc.
On the other hand, what do you think about this 12 year old who popped up on the Raspberry Pi forum yesterday: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=45455
Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments, "Honor thy father and mother"?
Kids don't need one of everything provided on demand by their parents.
I presume the kid is a computer geek because he already has one or more computers. If he really wants one, summer is here.. mow somebody's lawn for cash.
Learning to provide for oneself is an extremely important skill.
This is the "power distribution set up" I use. It was just over $3, came with the connector you see, supplies up to 3A with great regulation, and accepts anything from 6-23V.
It works perfectly, btw.
Actually, he did say he would pay for it himself, he has the cash, his mom simply would not allow him to possess one.
My sister-in-law would not allow me to give a computer to my nephew when he was nine. Some folks thing certain technology is not appropriate for kids. On the other hand we observe that often the best engineers were the ones that played with thermite when they were in middle school. Go figure.
The raison d'etre of the Pi is more like this:
It was noticed that the number of applicants to British universities to study computer science had fallen dramatically over five or more years. Also the kids getting into the universities were comming with less and less computer skills. In the past they would already know how to program often in more than one language, including assembler. The new intakes had had to be taugh computer programming from scratch before they could even start of the actual computer science study.
The speculation was that young kids of time gone by were brought up around computers like C64, the BBC computer and the host of others that were around at that time. Those guys gettingt to uni had been hacking on their machines for years before. The newer generation lived in a world of game consoles that were not programmable or PC's that were not programmable because "dad would be mad if I broke it".
Conclusion was that to fix the sorry state university entrants a replacement for the C64's and Beebs of the day should be provided. It had to be cheap eanough that kids could get hold of them like any other toy and it did not matter if they broke them. It had to be standalone, useable without taking over the family PC.
And so the Pi was born. Not to satisfy some huge and noble goal like providing computers to the starving masses of the world. But to fix the ignorance of UK school kids and attract more of them into CS education and technology in general, for the benifit of UK universities and the future of the UK ecconomy. I have never seem such a book. The instruction for getting the Pi running are here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/quick-start-guide very short and sweet. I guess a question to the Pi forum would have that fixed. Much like Propeller problems get resolved here. Reboot should be the last resort. Yep, one is a full up computer running a multi user operating system and one is a micro-controller. I would hope they are different. They are both incredibly easy though. Why? For sure the Prop is what you want for real-time control of real things. But the Pi does have some capability that way as well. Besides I think there is a lot of scope for Propeller-Pi. Consider a robot project with a Pi for brains, networking and storage linked to a Prop for the low level I/O.
P.S. If anyone needs propgcc ready to run on the Pi I can put up copy somewhere.
Simply put, it is almost impossible to get a good entry level job as there has been an oversupply of graduates to the marketplace. Even a Phd in Computer Science doesn't really guarantee a stable career. Contract programing on a freelance basis has take over.
This cycle has been seen in Engineering degrees as well. There just tend to be cycles of demand in particular educational majors as the public believes certain disciplines will provide a bright fast-track future, and then the bubble bursts and only the best and the brightest find a home.
I suspect on can bypass a lot of woes by applying a computer or engineering education in military service as a way to establish a resume advantage. But the average degree is not going to generate the kind of success that it is expected to do so.
And the quality of the talent available I've seen in the last 20 years appears inversely proportional to the supply of BSCS candidates.
It is a huge amount of work to find the right candidates now.
What you know is less important than who you know in a job market.
Add to that the failure to recognize IT / Computing as an important part of the enterprise. In fact, the Lean IT movement happening right now in Europe is attempting to spread that message, taking the lean thinking model common to higher end manufacturing and applying it to IT. This will favor the college grads as it takes the baseline expectations up to a level where some higher level planning and working with the business actually is seen as enabling, not some cost center to be marginalized to the highest degree possible.
(The idea of a cost center vs profit center is probably one of the more damaging MBA type thinking models there is, and that's a discussion for another time, place and day)
The move to massively centralize IT, diluting it down to some basic common denominator does make it cheap, but it also rubs off the shiny bits that can really make people and things move to compete! And it ignores the value of education and experience, favoring more basic skills.
And that comes back to the "who" and it's important to understand who values this stuff and who just needs a monkey.
And so, as the decline of the 'baby boom' generation going to university occurred, universities were more than willing to look the other way about internal quality control issues in order to make financial ends meet. A foreign student getting a degree from an esteemed university might not have to pass as high standards, just because that student is 'going home' and will not be an obvious embarrassment to the university.
And then there has been the internet providing services that write papers for students.
The list of issues goes on and on.
But Taiwan has one of the highest Phd per capita ratios and most have struggled with a good career path.
There was a time when a Bachelors secured a good living, then it was a Masters, and then a Phd. Now I tell my students that two Masters (with one in Business Admin or Accounting) are likely to be the only solution. Having a Phd often means getting passed over as too much education.
1. my NAS running samba and nfs hosting a 500GB USB drive serving 36GB of music and 22GB of pictures along with several working shares such as nightly backups.
2. my local net LAMP server which hosts my open2300 weather station and a mysql DB of music to provide click and play. I have not figured out how to categorize the pictures or that would be another DB.
3. DNS, DHCP, and Ntp server for the local net not that I need it.
Projects that I have completed but are not active right now include
Web Cam server, Print Server, Digital Frame, and X10 controller.
I also built a Wireless Access Point which I use when traveling. It has a huge SD card and serves my music and pictures and operates as a wireless hotspot anywhere with or without internet.
In progress is the top level controller for a robot with the prop doing all the hardware interfacin
g.
When I got to uni in 1975 only 10% of the population did so. You were not there to learn how to get a "good job". You were there because you had a passion to study what was on offer. Never mind where it leads. In my case was physics. Turned out that despite my strenuous efforts to get a place there I was not going to be a physist of any kind. My peers were a lot smarter and passionate about it than I was. However I will always be grateful I had the opportunity to mix with those guys.
Recently I have been watching some videos from CS courses in Berkeley. Shite, this is not about teaching the language of the day, C++, or Java or whatever. It's about computer science. The fundamentals of computing. What a comuter can or cannot do. Actually you don't even need a computer to study the mathematics of that.
If you are going to spend three or four years of your young life in university studying such things you should have a passion for that above all else.
If you are looking for a high paying job, go to trade school. Or like Bill Gates just get on with it.
.
-Phil
This is a serious under estimate of what 12 year olds can achieve and misunderstanding of the Raspi projects motivations.
To put such doubts to rest I would like to present an example. Please meet 13 year old Amy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a35XINnYFtA&feature=youtu.be and read an interview with her here: http://raspberrypi.mythic-beasts.com/magpi/The-MagPi-issue-13-en.pdf
Amy happens to have hit the spotlight having hit the Raspberry Pi wave but I'm sure the Parallax guys could tell you stories of other youngsters who got enthused with Parallax devices.
Yes please. And yes to the rest as well.
The STEM effort talks about a shortage of Engineers. There are many engineering jobs. There are still engineers without jobs. Why?
The is SHORTAGE of highly qualified engineers that will work for nothing. These would be new grads, H1 visa types.
There are great engineering jobs out there, but engineers tend to stay in those jobs, particularly in this economy.
Experienced engineers are perceived as too expensive. If your over 30, employers are less interested. This is not limited to engineering, the effect is reported in many fields where experience is in fact important, but obtaining that experience is a long term investment. If one is in an area where there were large layoff in an engineering field, it remains difficult to find one of the few available jobs.
I just discovered that one of the precocious fourth graders in my LittleRobots class is actually a third grader. Age has less impact, the ability to read and follow instructions seems to be the limiting factor. If one assumes the students are going to succeed, and one helps them until they do, they succeed. Its a hard-to-miss target.
Looking into setting up webserver (NGINX) and some GPIO. Tons of decent online support, (Like Prop, not quite as good!)
I'm finally getting back to Linux!
Interesting, how does the Go part work on the Pi? Source?
@JordanC Clark: I dl'd the ignition demo, it asks for login/pwd, pls advise. Tnx.
I was looking into Go on the Pi for building a means of streaming data collected from a Propeller out over the network. Amazingly I found out it was horrible slow. Slower than using JavaScript under Node.js. I could see it was Go's garbage collection causing the problem, the data flow would stall and stutter visibly as it cleaned it self up.
Default login for Ignition is:
username: admin
password: password
You can read up on my installation on the IA Forums. The SD image I made is there as well. Post any insights or improvements over there, so we don't clutter this thread any more than than necessary.
We have Go working for linux in general, install as heater shows. The RPi is not going to be the fastest linux box on the block, unless your block has very slow linux boxes.
The way it works is using a "channels" implementation (Google call it Go Channels) which may or may not be similar to CSP channels from CAR Hoare. In any case, Go and Propforth use the same channel protocol, and we can get a whole bunch of channels talking fast, up to the limits of the physical link. Which is actually useless unless you need 32 channels talking on one phyiscal wire. We can have each cog talking on one or more channels to logfiles, process scripts, etc, and make a whole bunch of stuff happen at once in an organized way. It how we do autometed build, logging, automated test, and results checking. On a linux workstation it moves right along, but on a RPi the idea is to start it off and just let it run over night. So we don't care if its slow, as long as the main workstation is not tied up. All this is in the propforth download, in the development directory, including all source. But the hard bits are not very well documented.
I've been absent way too long ... ah, life, death, and everything in between, you know.
Phil asked what we're doing with our Pi's, so I'm cheating a bit to answer as I'm only *planning* on getting one.
Once I do, I'll tackle getting an LED to blink - and then make the easy, immediate transition to openCV.
LOL
Any luck, Prof Braino ? openCV's can be a real pain to get working correctly. (I ended up using MATLAB on a project instead one time before.) Was trying to figure out which way to go on a new, little project. One way is using a Prop and Hanno's Viewport as it has openCV nicely built in. Versus using a Pi + the camera the Pi folks offer now too.
However, I'd like it to be portable, remote, and unconnected to a laptop / box. The Pi on the one hand is a bit hungry @750 mA (+ the cam.), and, on the other, I'm unsure if implementing this with a Prop standalone will work. So I'm kind of in a bind.
I was surprised how difficult it is to search for info on how a Prop might be used to get images onto an SDCard ... any suggestions / links ? Thanks!
BTW, it's great to see you all still so active and helpful.
- Howard
aka CounterRotatingProps of yore
Hey Howard
I'm still finishing up a robot class, but the RPi + Camera + openCV is planned to be in the bot add-ons. The task will be for each bot to find it's builder by face recognition.
At this point, my C guy is busy and I try to leave the tough parts to the experts. But as the camera makes its way into the wild I imagine there will be more examples to borrow from.
What is the difference between a V2 and a V1?
answer -> V2 has 2 mounting holes. Both of mine are V2
What software did you use for one to be a Wireless Access Point? What transceiver?
Though when compared to some other devices out there the price/performance & features isn't tops....the educational opportunities that grew up around this thing are amazing!
I used the standard raspian image with the edimax USB dongle, I also used the tenda dongle successfully. The ability to become a hotspot is all in the network configuration files just Google it there are several sites with tutorials other than that my app is just a standard nas with samba and NFS configured