Raspberry marketing

    Marketing played a trick on the Raspberry Pi.
    I will present my view on this board because I have repeatedly faced with the fact that people do not understand its purpose, try to use it for other purposes and disappointedly switch to other ARM boards.
    Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi is a very important step that no one has been able to take before it.


    A couple of historical suggestions. Since I learned to program, I always dreamed of being able to control objects in the real world. The problem was that the computer was large, the cat wept on the periphery and everything was designed to enter information into it and output it in the form of sounds, pictures, texts on the screen and paper.
    And I wanted to finally realize the dream and build a robot that can interact with the real world.

    Divided worlds


    What did we have? The microcontrollers are wonderful, working with real objects is quite simple - there are legs, I wrote in a variable number and voltage appeared on them, I set up the peripherals and you can control motors, servos, measure voltage, communicate with sensors and do a lot of interesting things.
    The trouble is that MK has little memory and processing power. So few that the vast majority of robots crawl along the white or black lines stupidly, try to stumble on the wall and that’s it. Few robot combines at least a few of these features, and if it can, it costs such money that only a very enthusiastic person who is not sorry to spend the cost of a good car on such experiments can repeat this at home. But this is very exciting! I would like to make a really interesting robot that can do a lot of things both autonomously and on a task from a large PC, can interact with other robots and store some data. But on the MK, these capabilities are greatly limited by the available memory and computing power. And WiFi for communication over the network to fasten to MK is often quite difficult.

    Okay, the PC has the processing power, you can contact MK via radio or wire and combine the power of a universal processor with powerful programming languages, the ability to process audio and video with interaction with the real world. Wretched, but possible. Yes, you won’t go far from the computer, you can put a laptop on the platform, but such a robot will not be small, autonomy is modest, fragile and awkward.

    And then the Raspberry Pi appeared

    She combined the work with all the standard buses of the microcontroller world - SPI, I2C, she has UART, all this is available directly from her, and her modest appetites allow her to be fed from one 18650 element through a coin-sized booster! Hooray, you can make a robot from a toy tank, a model car, from anything, you can directly work with accelerometers, barometers, GPS, gyroscopes, control servos. And all this in one case. And the CPU power is enough to broadcast the video stream from the USB camera via WiFi. You can communicate with this robot over the network from another robot, PC, or over the Internet. It combines both low-level interfaces and the power of a universal processor and a real operating system, in which there can be tasks of the rudiments of artificial intelligence, control of servos, motors and everything you want.
    RPi is a computer and microcontroller in one small board. No wires, no radio interfaces for communicating logic and hardware, everything is inside a tiny board, it fits on my little caterpillar robot and all she needs is a motor control module with which it can work directly. Servo drives and LEDs are also possible.

    Credit card sized computer

    However, the RPi was promoted like a credit card-sized laptop, it showed videos, played kwaka, and in general showed in every way that this is a good basis for a media center. A sort of super-cheap PC for everyone, plug in a TV, mouse and keyboard and you have a comp.

    And what really is?

    In fact, the media core of RPi is really powerful, but that's how a general-purpose processor is hardly a PII-300. Wait for the epiphany browser to launch - the whole event, programming on the raspberry itself in the graphic IDE is not the most pleasant thing. It is leisurely by modern standards. She does not have SATA, Ethernet is the same through the USB bridge. Everyone turned around disappointedly and began to consider alternatives.

    But none of this is necessary!

    For its application in the study of electronics, programming, building robots, it has everything that is needed, and there is enough power for a huge number of tasks. In addition, it has an audio output and a video output that allows you to connect not only a digital monitor, but also a small 4-7 "TV to output some information. You can connect a cheap Atmega168 microcontroller via I2C or SPI bus, for example, and not occupy its only UART that you can use to work with GPS or radio module APC220 is always good to have a choice is possible to build a flexible and sophisticated system that's interesting....
    It would seem - the perfect dress for robotostroiteley and interested in electronics, but consumers the world looked on it as usual the first low-power computer, and in this Role Malinka really homely.
    But just think - before any ARM board on which you can install Linux or Windows CE cost hundreds of dollars, it was with uncomfortable conclusions, there is little documentation, for example Gumstix. They are difficult to buy, they are fragile, inconvenient for embedding. Yes, for developers in large companies it’s a penny, but for home, for a hobby, they are unprofitable.
    And now we have all this at an affordable price - only about $ 55 with home delivery. And nothing else is needed!

    Here is a simple example of how you can quickly and easily get to GPIO on Raspberry:

    Sorry, for the quality of the video, it’s dark in the evening, it did not work to cover the diaphragm.

    So, any analogues only seem compact, most often it is just the foundation, they need power supplies, radiators, expansion cards, all this often costs more than twice as much, is poorly documented, not suitable for robots and working with electronics directly.
    RPi is also not perfect, but it has practically no analogues in this area.

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