Raspberry Pi Founder Demos Touchscreen Display For DIY Kits 81
An anonymous reader writes: Over 4 million Raspberry Pis have been sold so far, and now founder Eben Upton has shown off a touchscreen display panel that's designed to work with it. It's a 7" panel, roughly tablet sized, but slightly thicker. "With the incoming touchscreen panel The Pi Foundation is clearly hoping to keep stoking the creative fires that have helped drive sales of the Pi by slotting another piece of DIY hardware into the mix." Upton also discussed the Model A+ Raspberry Pi board — an updated version they'll be announcing soon.
Obvious question... (Score:5, Funny)
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Does the :P mean you're giving us a raspberry?
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Re:After whast happened to Odroid-w, why? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd never heard of this controversy... but after looking it up, there's no proof rPI had anything to do with that... and even if they did, they kind of had a point. rPI is Not an open hardware project and never claimed to be. All the hacking people are using it for is welcome, but wasn't what they were going after in the beginning. You can't just copy other peoples closed source hardware.
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rPI is Not an open hardware project and never claimed to be.
Nonsense. They claimed to be generally open, hardware and software. Then it was pointed out that important parts of the software were so closed you couldn't even use them. Eventually it was opened up enough so that you could use them, but all the important parts except the interface (which was originally closed) remain secret sauce. They also claimed to use all documented interfaces, but provided inadequate documentation for the display and camera connectors for a seriously long time as well.
They absolutely
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You can't just copy other peoples closed source hardware.
But the Odroid-W wasn't a copy of any of the Raspberry Pi boards, it was merely based around the same BCM2835 SoC they are.
Re:After whast happened to Odroid-w, why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Isn't it more important to do cool and interesting things with a computer rather than everything obsessedly being open source?
The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.
Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. How
Re:After whast happened to Odroid-w, why? (Score:5, Interesting)
We want tools of computing to be as useful and flexible and free (in design) as cement, steel girders, wrenches and sockets, pencils and paper.
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We want tools of computing to be as useful and flexible and free (in design) as cement, steel girders, wrenches and sockets, pencils and paper.
While the general concepts of those tools are free and open, there are patents on specific implementations of all of them. People are always inventing better wrenches. If you made a copy of Craftman's new wrench of the week and started selling them, I'm sure you'd be hearing from their lawyers.
We live in a world, wrong or right, were people innovate for profit, not the betterment of society. I don't see why people feel computing devices should be any different.
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We live in a world, wrong or right, were people innovate for profit, not the betterment of society.
Not always, thank goodness. Sometimes people innovate and give it away. Some of what's given away is quite valuable.
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Are we going to keep saying this forever? When are these things going to fall to the floor and become wrenches? (A wrench is a universally used device with no encumbrances, a true tool.)
We want tools of computing to be as useful and flexible and free (in design) as cement, steel girders, wrenches and sockets, pencils and paper.
I have about $10k worth of patented tools out in my garage. Your continuous wrench examples are hilariously ironic considering Cement, Steel girders, wenches and sock, pencils and paper all have patents
You seem to think that the collective idea of a "Wrench" is the same as going to home depot to buy "Crescent Wrench" And I'll admit, those of us that use real tools tend to refer to them by their brand name. I call all my adjustable wrenches "Crescent Wrenches" because they made the first one I ever owned.
But
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Isn't it more important to do cool and interesting things with a computer rather than everything obsessedly being open source?
You simply don't get it: in the long run, those two ideals are anything but mutually exclusive.
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Broadcom did them a favour. That chip is hopelessly slow and out dated compared to any Cortex ARM CPU.
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A favour that resulted in millions of Pi sales. I could do with a slow favour like that.
For all the endless talks about how slow the RPi is you'd think that the competitors would be outselling them. I guess some people don't care about things like speed.
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A favour that resulted in millions of Pi sales. I could do with a slow favour like that.
For all the endless talks about how slow the RPi is you'd think that the competitors would be outselling them. I guess some people don't care about things like speed.
Not everything needs blinding speed. Sometimes it's more useful to have a slower computer that's the size of a credit card, consumes less thn 5 watts, and costs around $35 or less.
The Pi can be sluggish, true, but it's more than a match for the workhorse PCs of 10-15 years ago.
And it's not dog-slow at everything. It renders Minecraft graphics impressively fast. In Java, no less.
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It's actually a bit slower than a Pentium 3 450 of ~15 years ago
It has a decent GPU though.
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Tell it to the GP. The RPi is the fastest embedded system in my house. Most of the others sit between 8 and 20MHz, all of them serving useful functions.
My RPi has no problem decoding 1080p video as a media centre.
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We need a whitebox mobile device. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I am missing is the idea of a whitebox mobile devices. so you can build your own phone and your own tablet.
It may not be Sexy as an iPad, but you can configure in ways to get what you want out of it. More speed, more memory, better video, or huge battery life...
That is what made the PC popular, was the fact that you could get a PC configured for what you need it for. A cheap low end box, to a high end system. Was all possible.
This also allowed for a bunch of small companies to start building computers.
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Problems with that.
Cell frequencies are licensed and pretty much anything that touches those frequencies needs to be fully approved by the FCC.
The carriers aren't going to allow it on their networks.
Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.
When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.
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You can buy 3G/4G/GSM/whatever Arduino shields for your own devices. They can be used to make phone calls, get internet access, etc.
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or huge battery life...
isn't going to happen with the raspi.
No, not with Model A+, either.
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You mean something like Project Ara [projectara.com]? (Actually, Project Ara's website sucks, try the Wikipedia page on it instead [wikipedia.org].)
People are working on a modular cell phone. Not open hardware, necessarily, but something which you can upgrade piecemeal. I don't think anyone's managed to create a real marketable solution, but - well, there are companies working on it.
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#gamergate and it's ilk needs to go away.
I love video games and have been playing them since I was 8 (I'm 35 now). I will never again call myself a "gamer".
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The last thing we need is anyone claiming to be one of them.
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#gamergate is about as much of a conspiracy as mystery meat Monday. Who cares? I mean, who really cares?
So what if some game developer cheated on her boyfriend and started a relationship with a journalist. We are talking about the journalistic integrity of a game journalist.
Are we going to go after every athlete that sleeps with a female reporter? Are we going to go after every female reporter that sleeps with a foot ball or basket ball player and give them a glowing review as their contract is about to
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Except I can do a shitload more with a Pi than you can ever do with a tablet.
I love how the morons like you spout off when you dont know shit about electronics in general.
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Why yes, making a more expensive, less useful product is always a good goal. If you don't want to run Play Services or use the Play Store, that is fine, get yourself an Android and install one of the good ROMs that don't use those products. It is faster, cheaper and likely to draw less attention from those you're paranoid about anyways.
The easiest way to blend into a crowd is by blending into a crowd, not by wearing Neon Colors in a sea of grey.
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But please carry on with Google Play, iTunes etc. etc. we're not stopping you.
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mipi dsi, you can get mipi screens for $5 on ebay
there are and wont be ANY open drivers for rPI, just like there are no open drivers for the mipi camera, mipi port is on the embedded 'proprietary' side of BCM chip and broadcom is HOSTILE against anyone wanting to touch their magic closed source firmware blob.
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you can get 1.54' 240x240 mipi screen for $5
http://www.electricstuff.co.uk... [electricstuff.co.uk]
3.5' with touchscreen are ~$20
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Replac... [ebay.com]
7' with touchscreen are ~$40
http://www.aliexpress.com/item... [aliexpress.com]
so only ~2x overpriced, just like the camera module
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wait, nexus 7 screen is ~$20 + ~$12 digitizer, so ~$32 for a 7' screen with digitizer
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http://www.panelook.com/TFTMD0... [panelook.com]
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Yeah, but you can't really run a temperature controlled fan stoker for a BBQ pit from a tablet either, which is one of the rPi projects I'm considering, being able to have a touchscreen to do the settings and view the temp graphs on would be kind of cool.
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Why not? They have USB ports. [sparkfun.com]
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but you can't really run a temperature controlled fan stoker for a BBQ pit from a tablet either, which
Of course you can. There's lots of ways to do that, including hacking into the audio hardware. I'd probably just use an old phone though, and not a whole tablet. You don't need that much screen for that job. Most devices have some GPIO on board, which can be used with some effort, but using the audio hardware is much easier. Use one of the many phones with USB OTG, and connect up a cheap MCU to do the USB-to-GPIO work.
Getting ridiculous now... (Score:1)
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VGA (Score:2)
I hope "VGA" is a bad hint at what this screen will be. Pi's have HDMI output, so surely the screen will support that, if not HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL. Adafruit's 7 inch LCD screens are 800x640 or more, so hopefully he's not referring to 640x480 resolution.
Hopefully what they release is at least 720p.
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Good idea, but that site sucks (Score:3)
Intertesting (Score:2)
I wonder where the disconnect is.
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And you're no exception to that rule.
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The disconnect is called snobbery. My device is faster, better, smaller, quieter or what have you. So what? The Pi has the right mix of versatility, power and price to make it a success. If it doesn't fit their needs then they should feel free to shop elsewhere.
New PI A+ (Score:1)
Not, really: "We’re going to do an announcement about an A+ soon. I think it’s going to be an exciting product,” he said, without giving exact details of how the board will be upgraded.
That's all he said.
only took 2 years for mipi dsi screen (Score:2)
just like it took them ~2 years for mipi camera, all because of closed source blob and Broadcom hostility. Instead of releasing simple shim drivers for MIPI ports they insist on keeping everything in the binary blob and tying users to their branded camera module (thankfully Chinese took care of that and you can buy 'counterfeit' at 2/3 the price), and now to their branded screen (which no doubt will be 2x the price of generic mipi screen on ebay)
Raspi = Evil (Score:1)