Lunch and Big Ideas!

[Owen Densmore]

We'll have a wedtech lunch at 12:30, old Second Street brewery (not rail-yard).  Also, bring your ideas for wedtech talks that we'd like to get restarted.

BTW, and OT, This may be of interest to our designers: http://goo.gl/lA8eU It is a "kit" of icons etc for web design that was mentioned in the latest HTML5 Newsletter http://html5weekly.com/

See you there!

   -- Owen

[Stephen Guerin]

Icons kit? You feature icons kit when the same newsletter has a link that addresses one of your biggest rants :-)  
      http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/equation.html?locale=default

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[Owen Densmore]

Holy cow!  Thanks for the catch!

Talk about a Big Idea -- integrate symbolic math into computing.  Nobel prize .. oops no, they don't give a math/computation award.  Fields medal.

   -- Owen

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 2/8/12 10:10 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

Talk about a Big Idea -- integrate symbolic math into computing.  Nobel prize .. oops no, they don't give a math/computation award.  Fields medal.

Not sure what you mean.  Mathematica is a functional programming language and Macsyma (Maxima) is written in Common Lisp.  Or do you mean self-proving programs?

http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php
http://www.ats-lang.org/

[Jack Stafurik]

Here’s a computer (or motherboard with CPU, more precisely) from the UK that will be selling for $25/$35 hopefully this month. This effort was started by a Cambridge (UK) University lecturer concerned about the declining computer literacy in his entering students. This may be an interesting opportunity for our educational outreach – maybe a few courses on programming these and developing systems that do interesting things with them.

 

Jack

 

 

[Owen Densmore]

I love the educational possibilities for this critter.

But I'm wondering: just what would be the minimum "system" one could get by with?  There have been some suggestions on keyboard/mouse/trackpad that are cheap enough, but the display is the biggie.

I guess the question is: could a system with the RP as "the computer" cost less than $100?  I thought of using a phone/pod/pad for the display but not sure how, exactly.

   -- Owen

[Joshua Thorp]

Xwindows or VNC?  

What would you do with one?

Home automation hacks might be fun.

--joshua

[Roger Critchlow]

Owen --

Your ability to create mysteries where none exist never ceases to amaze me!  

The Pi is built to plug into any TV that has an RCA input jack for video in on it.  Google found a 7" LCD portable TV new for less than $50.  if you go with used then I expect the labor to carry it off is the bottom line.   There is also an HDMI output and cheap adapters will do for DVI and VGA, so it basically works 99.9% of the existing screen bearing devices in the world.

Whatever made you think of trying to re-purpose Apple hardware for some DIY project?  You think some drop-outs tinkering in a garage in Palo Alto could improve on what Apple has already done?

You can order a Pi from newark.com, the first batch is scheduled to ship April 3rd, but I believe it's sold out, the next batch should ship in May or June.

-- rec --

2012/3/6 Owen Densmore <ow...@backspaces.net>

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[Owen Densmore]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org> wrote:

Owen --

Your ability to create mysteries where none exist never ceases to amaze me!  

Glad to oblige!

 

The Pi is built to plug into any TV that has an RCA input jack for video in on it.  Google found a 7" LCD portable TV new for less than $50.  if you go with used then I expect the labor to carry it off is the bottom line.   There is also an HDMI output and cheap adapters will do for DVI and VGA, so it basically works 99.9% of the existing screen bearing devices in the world.

Well, do you see your folks liking you taking over the TV?  Or end up buying the TV you found?  And keyboard & mouse?

Here's the key: this is supposed to be an educational device.  That's its purpose as stated.  Yet all the usages I've seen uses a "computer" (laptop, desktop) to do the heavy lifting.  What's the classroom to be like?  Lots of desktops with RPi's hanging off them?

I can't see "education" being "borrow my dad's laptop, hook it up and download code created on the laptop".

So its seems to be more like an Arduino with a nice set of features but absolutely useless without a lot of extra stuff if you want to write programs *on the RPi*.

You are right, however, that there are some promising devices: Axion AXN-8701 7-Inch Widescreen Handheld LCD TV on Amazon was $60.  So you could put together a system, it looks like, for the $100 range.

So I bet someone comes out with a nifty solution to kit it so that it can both stand by its own, and be disconnected and used as a DYI critter.

   -- Owen

[Stephen Guerin]

REC,

Your inability to embrace reasonable explorations never ceases to amaze me ;-p

I think using an iPad via a VNC connection could be a simple stunt without using a dedicated monitor.

-S

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org> wrote:

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Stephen...@Redfish.com <stephen...@redfish.com>

office: 505.995.0206 mobile: 505.577.5828

redfish.com |  simtable.com  |  sfcomplex.org  

[Roger Critchlow]

Personally, I'll just ssh into it.  My applications don't need a dedicated keyboard or monitor to run.

Owen, no one needs another computer to develop for the Raspberry Pi.  Plug it into the ethernet, pull the linux sources from git, install gcc (though it's probably in the base distribution), recompile the kernel, install, and reboot.  Another computer is not necessary, in many ways that's the whole point of the project.  A 700MHz ARM isn't the fastest development platform in the world, but it's fully capable.

The Arduino is a 20MHz 8 bit processor that does require another computer to be made useful.  But it's turned out to be a massively successful educational platform.  Why should something that does not require another computer, provides 140x the raw compute power (35x clock * 4x bus), 8000x the processor memory, ethernet connectivity, composite video, and HDMI video at the same price point be such a disappointment to you? Have you tried to 

Dang I got that wrong, the Arduino only has 2kbytes of ram, should be 128000x the processor memory, with a 4Gbyte SDCard it's 125000x the program storage memory, but it's been tested with up to 32Gbyte SD Cards.

 

-- rec --

2012/3/6 Stephen Guerin <stephen...@redfish.com>

[Owen Densmore]

Here's what I'm groping for, quite unsuccessfully apparently.  :)

What would a classroom, teaching programming & computer architecture at SFX with RPi, look like?

Would everyone have a laptop and ssh into the RPi?  Or would the RPi be stand-alone w/ a keyboard, mouse, monitor attached?  Would we use a nifty mix of things for folks trying smart phones for attaching to RPi?

Please don't get me wrong .. I really like the RPi.  Dean Gerber and I had a long conversation last Friam and he told me of his experiences teaching with commodore 64's long ago and how successful it was, being very hands on and using a simple language like Basic.  We both agree that it would be far better than your basic laptop + IDE experience.

The intimacy with the HW and the wonder of a full blown OS on a SSD would be super.  So personally, I'd love to maximize the use of RPi's power to compile and use several languages, including command-line use like Bash and interesting commands like curl.

I'm just having difficulty envisioning the classroom experience.  I guess the obvious keyboard/mouse/monitor fits RPi best but then you have to duplicate that at home for homework.  Or the laptop approach where the classroom provides very little beyond an ethernet and a bunch of cables.  Fits your ssh mode nicely.

   -- Owen