Secret Project Berry
Jun. 25th, 2012 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsIt arrived today.
Sometime last year (I don't remember when), I saw a news story about a nonprofit group in Britain that was unsatisfied with their country's computer education (pre-college, it is pretty much "here's how to use MS Office") and wanted to make a super-cheap, super-easy-to-use developer machine. It would initially be just a development board, and they wanted to sell it for $25. They called it the Raspberry Pi.
I figured that it would be a while before this was available, if it ever was, and the world would probably forget about it long before it was, so I set up a Google Alert to email me if there was any news. Man was I wrong. Apparently demand for these has been insane. Around Christmas I was able to sign up to buy one at some point in the future. Then right before I left for Berlin I was at the head of the line and finally allowed to buy one. There was a couple weeks of lead time to make it, and then last week it shipped. Really slow, from England. Then today, it finally arrived.
It is, as advertised, a small dev board that runs Linux. It's about the size of an Arduino and about as fast as an average late-90s machine, but with better graphics. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet but it does work, plug it into a keyboard and an HDMI monitor and an iPhone charger and it boots up and is a little Linux box.
Sometime last year (I don't remember when), I saw a news story about a nonprofit group in Britain that was unsatisfied with their country's computer education (pre-college, it is pretty much "here's how to use MS Office") and wanted to make a super-cheap, super-easy-to-use developer machine. It would initially be just a development board, and they wanted to sell it for $25. They called it the Raspberry Pi.
I figured that it would be a while before this was available, if it ever was, and the world would probably forget about it long before it was, so I set up a Google Alert to email me if there was any news. Man was I wrong. Apparently demand for these has been insane. Around Christmas I was able to sign up to buy one at some point in the future. Then right before I left for Berlin I was at the head of the line and finally allowed to buy one. There was a couple weeks of lead time to make it, and then last week it shipped. Really slow, from England. Then today, it finally arrived.
It is, as advertised, a small dev board that runs Linux. It's about the size of an Arduino and about as fast as an average late-90s machine, but with better graphics. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet but it does work, plug it into a keyboard and an HDMI monitor and an iPhone charger and it boots up and is a little Linux box.
