DescentBB

Now I need to go do epic things with it.

Dwarf Fortress!

Never heard of it, so I Googled. It sounds like it's a cool little computer snoopy. You'll have to show us what it can do. But it seems kind of small to even do anything substantial, but heck, what do I know.

TC, smartphones today are basically linux/unix boxes. Look at their capabilities with 3d real time rendering. Size doesn't mean much anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (overclocking, up-to 1 GHz)
VideoCore IV GPU,
512MB ram
SD card for booting and long-term storage.
priced at US$ 25 and US$ 35.

OMFG, that's kinda a big deal. a $35 system on a board that includes a GPU and that much ram? I'm amazed.
i was just looking at STM32 boards and(/or ) low end Nano Arduinos yesterday for the same price. But this sounds MUCH more capable.
(i just loved how the STM32 boards can get their power via USB, such a cool idea, i'm easily amused it seems... but i digress...)

Where's you get it Snoopy? Was it a kickstarter or something?

Isaac wrote:TC, smartphones today are basically linux/unix boxes. Look at their capabilities with 3d real time rendering. Size doesn't mean much anymore.

I think it does. If I'm going to play games or watch movies I'm going to do it on a screen at least big enough to immerse myself to the point of enjoyment. That kind of rules out smartphones. And iPods. And probably all but the biggest tablets.
I don't think the question should be "What can it do?" The question should be "Why should it do this?" And the developers of the smartphones need to give a good answer to that question before they add a bunch of junk to a phone that really doesn't need it.

I mean, I don't even think they should be called phones anymore. But that's me.

roid wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (overclocking, up-to 1 GHz)
VideoCore IV GPU,
512MB ram
SD card for booting and long-term storage.
priced at US$ 25 and US$ 35.

OMFG, that's kinda a big deal. a $35 system on a board that includes a GPU and that much ram? I'm amazed.
i was just looking at STM32 boards and(/or ) low end Nano Arduinos yesterday for the same price. But this sounds MUCH more capable.
(i just loved how the STM32 boards can get their power via USB, such a cool idea, i'm easily amused it seems... but i digress...)

Where's you get it Snoopy? Was it a kickstarter or something?

http://www.newark.com/ sells them at the $35 price tag, if you're willing to wait for the back order. I just went there and ordered one on my own.

Otherwise, you can find other people selling them at a marked up price elsewhere. Note that the $35 gets you a PCB, and that's it. Make sure you account for a power supply, HDMI cord, keyboard, (probably) USB hub, etc.

It's targeted a bit differently than arduino. This is mostly aimed at being a lightweight multimedia device, while arduino is moreso a hardware interface device.

I'll play with it a bit and get back to you guys. I'm going to start by putting XBMC on it and seeing how it does decoding HD VP8 video... it'll do full HD out of H.264, thanks to hardware acceleration, but I'm staying out of H264 because I don't have licensing to encode to H.264. BTW, people are working on having it encode to H.264 in real time (the chip is capable of both encoding and decoding).

Then, I intend to plug my USB TV tuner into it, and see how it does reading the stream & pushing it up the network to my comp that actually has some storage space...

In the long run, it'll probably become a fancy media center for my TV... pulling Video/Audio/etc. from my main comp and sending it to my TV... though the main computer already does that directly.

Otherwise, I'll get into the hardware IO bit and see if I can make it into a super-souped-up aquarium controller.... since eventually I'm going to be trying to build one of those (I was thinking arduino if I don't use the pi)

So far, I have arch installed and running. Once you boot the image, it runs just like my main computer, only a bit slower & it grabs the "arm" packages instead of the "x86_64" packages.

Then you'll let us know about how it runs Dwarf Fortress, right?

now that i think about it, i'm confused why it has a seperate GPU. Arn't all GPUs just ARMchips themselves? I thought the whole point of GPUs was to let modern chips get away from the x86 architecture, to strut their stuff as fast and energy efficient as possible. I mean... isn't a modern GPU merely a huge chip full of RISC cores?
Guess not. But now i'm curious as to why.


wow i know nothing about computers anymore.