Comments on Raspberry Pi Python Adventures: Going in the wrong direction

I'm assuming that if you kill your Raspberry P...

2013-01-21T22:53:05.268-05:00

I'm assuming that if you kill your Raspberry Pi, you can still reuse the SD card etc. So, the loss value is a grand total of $35. At any rate, SD cards are cheap: I just got a 32GB fast 30MB/s card for $28 and a 4GB for $3.99, locally.

Of course, if you send away in a hot air balloon or rocket, and lose the whole kit, then you have to add the cost of the battery pack, SD, GPS, camera and vehicule...

Now of course, if you are doing something specialized and want to bring the cost way down, then there are embedded processors and microcontrollers. For that, I've been using over the years the PIC and Atmega. They can be had for only a few dollars. I've also used TI Stellaris and launchpad (cheap!), and Propeller multicore (got a deal on a few of those bare DIP chip for only $4, wish I had gotten more). And FPGAs (in fact there is something interesting that is coming soon for the Raspberry Pi in that field). You just have to get the right tool for the job.

Still, I really favor the Pi for a lot of prototyping, since you can write the code in Python and be up and running from scratch in minutes.

Yes but the SD Card, keyboard, HDMI/TV are attaina...

2013-01-21T15:21:14.811-05:00

Yes but the SD Card, keyboard, HDMI/TV are attainable and it is possible to use another computer to write the SD Card (Though it would be useful if the hardware allowed loading to the SD Card. I'll be interested to see what happens when the Tegra 4 takes off.

Well a $35 machine isn't quite true (SD card e...

2013-01-21T11:50:03.842-05:00

Well a $35 machine isn't quite true (SD card etc) but close enough. It is a great little machine and great to play with and that is the point. At that price, you can play and not worry too much if it blows up, as long as you learn why it blew up ;-) . It actually makes a great Ethernet card for the Arduino, but with bags of extra capabilities for the same price and it's cheap to go wireless too. It has helped to drive down the price of similar boards and probably helped spur others into production, all of this to our benefit. No doubt there will be the usual cliques around each machine, each saying theirs is the best, who cares really, as long as the price keeps going down!