Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy
Hands-on
The ledgers of history are littered with the rotting corpses of well
intentioned, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to put computers in
the hands of the young, underprivileged or severely impoverished. Some,
like Intel's
Classmate wanted to put cheap, durable Wintel machines in every American classroom, while others, like the
OLPC
program, focused their efforts on developing nations. Okay, perhaps
it's a bit hyperbolic to compare those initiatives to decomposing
bodies, but there's no denying they haven't exactly flooded the world
with low-cost PCs the way they were envisioned. So, here comes the
Raspberry Pi,
another effort with lofty goals, both in terms of purpose and price. Of
course, the approach is different here -- more barebones, with a
healthy dose of inspiration from
Arduino
and the DIY movement. The question is, what has it learned from those
that have come before it? And, most importantly, where does the
Raspberry Pi go right and where does it go wrong? To find out, keep
reading after the break.
Raspberry Pi impressions
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The high price of low cost
If there's one place the Pi has been an unquestionable success, it's been on cost. The
$10 laptop?
Never materialized. The
$35 tablet? It cost
closer to $60. And OLPC's $100 laptop? It was
pushing $200
by the time it started shipping. The Raspberry Pi, on the other hand,
never drew a line in the sand, so, the fact that it clocks in at a
measly $35 for the
advanced model is all the more impressive.
Granted, it hits this Arduino-level price point by eschewing things like
storage, a display, wireless radios and even a protective case. What
you get instead, is a capable, but low-end ARM CPU with integrated RAM
and a surprisingly powerful GPU on an exposed board with a small, but
versatile assortment of connectivity options. There's an exposed SD slot
on the underside (where you'll need to stick your bootable media), a
pair of USB ports, an Ethernet jack and, your output options are HDMI or
an RCA video plug, paired with a 3.5mm headphone jack. You'll also spot
a microUSB port, used exclusively for power, and a set of 26 general
purpose I/O pins.
While some
crafty devs have managed to get Quake III up and running... it struggles
to keep up with even modest modern demands.
At the
heart of the Pi is a Broadcom BCM2835 SOC. The 700MHz ARM11 core
certainly isn't a barn burner. In fact, the foundation itself compares
performance to a 300MHz Pentium II, but with "much, much swankier
graphics" thanks to the Videocore 4 GPU. The chip itself is capable of
not only decoding 1080p video, but of hitting Xbox (we're talking
original, not 360) levels of 3D performance. In practice those claims
seem to be about spot on. While some crafty devs have managed to get
Quake III up and running on the diminutive Pi, it struggles to keep up
with even modest modern demands. Firing up the Midori browser in the
Debian "squeeze" distro suggested for use with the board and opening a
couple of tabs is enough to bring the entire system to a standstill. In
fact, simply launching Engadget was enough to pin the CPU and bring the
OS to a standstill for at least a few minutes. And don't even think
about watching streaming videos -- there is no support for Flash or HTML
5 at the moment. And, in case there was any doubt in your mind about
how painful just web browsing could be on this thing, we ran SunSpider
(which also pinned the CPU) and got a score of 44,230. By comparison,
our OG Droid (which is clocked at just 550MHz, but has the advantage of
being a Cortex A8 chip) pulled a 11,188.
Booting up and poking around
On the software front, things are currently a tad underwhelming. You have your choice of three officially supported
Linux variants (Debian Squeeze, Arch Linux ARM and QtonPi) and a port of
XBMC,
dubbed Raspbmc. We fired up Debian (the most beginner friendly of the
official options) and the media center and came away slightly bemused.
Each suffered from its own strange limitations and collection of
glitches that leads us believe they wouldn't be particularly useful as
general purpose machines, even in a classroom. Under Debian, we never
managed to get sound working and finding compatible apps for the Linux
desktop is an exercise in futility. What's more, on first boot you're
dumped into a command prompt -- because apparently it's the lack of time
spent punching arcane commands into a terminal that has killed interest
in computer science. If you're not comfortable in the command line you
can launch the LXDE UI by typing "startx" and get to pointing and
clicking with a mouse. The environment should be simple enough to figure
out for anyone who has ever used Windows. The default app selection is a
bit sparse, but the big sells here are the development tools, including
Scratch which is meant as an introduction to programming for kids.
Scratch is interesting, and certainly simple enough for a child to
understand, but it's hardly intuitive and very rough around the edges.
The default app selection is a bit sparse, but the big sells here are the development tools.
XBMC center fared slightly better in our testing, but not much. It
boots up fast enough (as does Debian) and works more or less as
advertised, provided you're the patient type. The now ubiquitous 1080p
copy of
Big Buck Bunny took about 15 to 20 seconds to load up
from a USB key, but once it did, played reasonably smoothly, audio
included. We also loaded up a decidedly busier clip -- a 720p copy of
the Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto fight -- and it was also
reasonably stutter free experience. Though, we angered the Pi when we
tried (but did not succeed) to skip past the ring entrances and straight
to the bout. Web-based content was a completely different story. We
managed to install the Engadget and YouTube add-ons, but both failed to
deliver. Launching an episode of the Engadget show took several minutes
and, once the video began playing back, we were presented with what
amounted to a slide show of the
nicest guy in tech
delivering his opening monologue. YouTube was an even more disastrous
endeavor, crashing the entire system, forcing us to pull the plug.
Wrap-up
In the end, it's important to remember that the Raspberry Pi's goals
are not to be an everyday PC or a media player, but more like a tinker
toy. It's supposed to be a low cost computer for developing apps or a
flexible and powerful option (at least compared to the Arduino) for your
DIY projects. Honestly, as an introduction to the world of hardware and
software hacking, the Arduino seems like a more natural and simpler
entry point. For the moment, the community around the Pi is small.
People are fascinated with it, but that has yet to translate into a
wealth of projects, hacks or software. As production ramps up and more
people figure out just how to leverage those I/O pins we expect that to
change. Till then, we'll just have to be satisfied with marveling at
what it accomplishes for a lowly $35.
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