Pi to Go: Hot Raspberry Pi DIY Mini Desktop PC Project 134
MojoKid writes "Hot Hardware recently set out to design a custom mini desktop system with the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer. People have configured the device for a variety of applications, from micro-servers to low cost media players. Basically, the goal was to turn what is currently one of the cheapest bare-bones computer boards into a fully enclosed mini desktop computer that could be taken anywhere without the need for cabling or setup. This small DIY project is just one of many examples of the flexibility of the Raspberry Pi's open architecture. And to think you can even run Quake and Minecraft on it."
Raspberry Pi is only very minimally open (Score:5, Informative)
The Raspberry Pi is not open hardware at the board level (schematic but no gerbers) nor at the SoC level (no full reference manual on the Broadcom BCM2835 device) nor at the boot level (booting and boot options are handled by the proprietary VideoCore IV) nor at the GPU and DSP levels (the VideoCore is entirely closed/under NDA). In fact, the only fully open thing about Raspberry Pi is its old and rather obsolete ARM11 processor.
So why exactly is anyone associating the word "open" with Raspberry Pi?
Far more open is the similarly priced BeagleBone Black [beagleboard.org], which provides full gerbers, full SoC reference manual, and full open source boot control (U-Boot). The BeagleBone Black's TI SoC does have a closed GPU, but since the board isn't aimed at running games nor consuming media like the Raspberry Pi is, it hardly matters. And the BeagleBone Black is far more capable in almost every other respect.
It's cool that Raspberry Pi has helped to bring ARM board prices down, but it shouldn't be called an open platform when it's mostly closed.
Re:Used? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not the right tool for the job... (Score:4, Informative)
The author has some serious misleading information, probably not his intention, but is misleading nonetheless.
For instance, it's not a "Solid Tie" for the ethernet. The Pi has ethernet over USB, so it can't be compared with the Black having the Ethernet over a dedicated PHY interface. Also the clock specs comparison is outright retarded as it's oranges to apple (The Pi has a armv6l vs armv7l of the BBB). It's like comparing clock speed of a P4 with a Intel i.
Re:Pi Madness (Score:4, Informative)
If underpriviliged kids want a PC they would be far more successful dumpster diving a couple of discarded PCs and an old crt and cobbling those together. Probably cheaper too.