Raspberry Pi Arriveth

Or not, because they’ve sold out already.

$35 dollar computer – which for one such as I, is less than a night down the pub etc.

There’s a bit of a video of it here.

Most of the space seems to be taken up with adaptors etc… looks a bit like an Arduino, but is actually an entire computer.

This is not the only one of these floating around out there… but as far as I’m aware, it’s the first to ship. Notable others being the Cotton Candy one from Norway

and the Israeli CuBox

but both of those clock in at over $100.

The Pi has a case (or 2) that you can download and print

Which kindof raises the possibility of selling “products” in which the only thing that gets shipped are the vitamin parts. The rest of it you print yourself, or get someone local to do it… with a diversity of skins/themes to choose from. Maybe. Similar to the way there are about a million different smartphone cases available at the moment… but instead of this being a “case”, it’s a whole outer shell… and the bit that you buy is just a load of circuits and chips.

Just a thought like.

I’m not sure if this is competition for Arduino or not – it’s not a hell of a lot bigger or more expensive… and is a fully fledged machine that runs languages that the likes of me already understands. It could well do with having a bunch of sensor plugins as well.

Coming from the other direction though are smartphones themselves – that already have the sensors and cameras built in, already with drivers etc… and in the next 10 years, there’s going to be A LOT of these hanging about, because Android devices are currently being activated at the rate of 850,000 a day (it’s gone up 100,000 since christmas) and there are currently 300 million of them in the wild. These are going to become obsolete… and then what? Bin them? “Recycle” them? Give them to charities?

Soon there is a hell of a lot of spare computing capacity, in packages that to all intents and purposes, don’t take up any space (unlike desktops or even laptops). Suddenly having a smartphone to turn virtually any electrical device into a “smart” device, isn’t such a stupid idea.