Raspberry Pi, worth a dabble?

[laika]

Are we?

For clarification I meant Jumbleduck and I were straying off-topic and mumbling about arduinos, certainly not criticising your question if that was how it was taken. The "sorry" was an apology for me chucking off-topic stuff into the conversation and distracting from the pi discussion

 

[dgadee]

For clarification I meant Jumbleduck and I were straying off-topic and mumbling about arduinos, certainly not criticising your question if that was how it was taken. The "sorry" was an apology for me chucking off-topic stuff into the conversation.

No, I just thought the discussion was interesting.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Or maybe it's a problem with expectations? The pi is a cheap and cheerful educational tool. It's been appropriated by people saying Hey! I can use this instead of £3000 worth of navigation kit! or £1000 of AV kit. So they buy a £100 add-on board made by and for hobbyists and are disappointed that when combined with their £40 computer it's actually a bit rubbish compared with the expensive commercial products.

Yes, I think you're right. Pi's look very cheap and cheerful but once - for a plotter, say - you have added a touchscreen, an enclosure, a power supply and a GPS of some sort you have spent a lot more than an equivalent system (a tablet, basically) but got nowhere near the performance of custom hardware at a much higher price.

Also (just t o complete my gripe) as one used to a proper Linux distribution - I am currently running three desktops and three laptops with Xubuntu or Lubuntu - Raspian seems like a very poorly supported bodge with some horrible habits like installing software in /home and mounting removable devices in ~/Desktop. The need to use s custom version of the distro for many hats is off-putting as well.

 

[laika]

Raspian seems like a very poorly supported bodge with some horrible habits like installing software in /home and mounting removable devices in ~/Desktop. The need to use s custom version of the distro for many hats is off-putting as well.

Expectations again: If you want something to "just work", get a mac ;-). What's custom about the custom distro? Aren't drivers just provided in an installable package? I confess that I am one of the men without HATs.

 

[ProDave]

Re Arduino Vs Pi.

They are different things for different purposes.

I used an arduino for a simple project that just had to read some inputs, do something with them and write to some outputs. It just runs a simple program. The advantages are you don't have to learn an OS. you write your code, download it and it runs. That is of curse it's limitation. I would not want to try and write a chard plotter for arduino indeed I doubt it would be possible. For that you want a proper computer with a file system and an OS.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Re Arduino Vs Pi.

They are different things for different purposes.

I used an arduino for a simple project that just had to read some inputs, do something with them and write to some outputs. It just runs a simple program. The advantages are you don't have to learn an OS. you write your code, download it and it runs. That is of curse it's limitation. I would not want to try and write a chard plotter for arduino indeed I doubt it would be possible. For that you want a proper computer with a file system and an OS.

Worth bearing in mind that even the Arduino is probably far more powerful than the Z80 common in the early 80s, or even than the PDP11! And they both ran flavours of Unix quite happily - Unix was developed for the PDP11 and Torch computers of Cambridge sold a Unix box based on a Z80 called the Unicorn. In about 1983, I wrote a data logging program for an ice sounding radar, on a Z80 without any OS and using assembler - no high level language, and if there had been, it would have used too much memory (I think I had 2k available for the program). What's more, the program was updated several times to cope with greater volumes of data.