Last May, the prototype Raspberry Pi board was about the size of a USB thumb drive with a goal price (assembled board only) of $25. A few months later and there are now two versions with far more features but barely a change in price. The Raspberry Pi now has 10/100 ethernet, and analog audio and video while keeping the HDMI, USB, and SD card support from the original prototype.When I first heard of the Rasberry Pi board, I though to myself, "They'll never actually build it!" But since I once doubted a young man named Linus, I decided to ignore common sense and just to hope.
The first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for the Model A and a mere $10 more for the Model B. The basic specs follow:
- 700MHz Broadcom media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM
- 128MiB (Model A) or 256MiB of SDRAM (Model B), stacked on top of the CPU as a PoP device
- OpenGL ES 2.0
- 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- Composite and HDMI video output
- One USB 2.0 port provided by the BCM2835
- SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
- General-purpose I/O (About 16 3v3) and various other interfaces, brought out to 1.27mm pin-strip
- Optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller (Model B)
- Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
- Capability to support various expansion boards
1 comment:
Very cool!!
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