TechStuffWhat is the Raspberry Pi? Who came up with the idea? What can the Raspberry Pi do? Listen in as your favorite tech gurus break down Raspberry Pi.
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me, as he always does when we record these podcasts, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. When Dick Gibson was a little boy, he was not Dick Gibson. Uh. And today we're going to sort of discuss one of our favorite topics. But you're about to reveal longtime listeners will know why this is going to be a difficult one. Yep, yep, yep. First of all, this comes to us courtesy of a little Facebook feedback. This comes from Arthur. He says, Hey, guys, I was wondering if you could maybe do a podcast on the Raspberry Hi computer PI PI. I love pie. Pie is awesome. It's both the number and the food, especially when the food in the number converge. Yes, because it is in this case raspberry pie is spelled p I like the number, but it has raspberry like the delicious fruity filling that we all love. So yeah, and it is not the next build of Android. No, no, in fact, it's specifically not Android. But you know, Jonathan, where you do you remember that the episode we recorded not too long ago about Commodore sixty four. I do recall such an episode. We're laughing to ourselves because in recording time, we did that last week, so you know that the episodes will be spaced out, so it's not that close together anyway. But don't worry, We're already spaced out enough as this absolutely. Now. One of the things we touched on in the Commodore sixty four episode was that this was that machine sold a lot of of uh computers to a lot of people. And one of the things that people did with those, especially young people, and it was fun to create your own programs, to learn exactly how programming works. In fact, the Commodore sixty four was the best selling computer of all time if you look at a very specific model of computer. Yes, so the Commodore sixty four sold I think it was seventeen million units, which was pretty incredible for a single device, especially given the the time at which it was sold and uh um, the price at which it sold. Uh, that was not the heyday of computing, but it's really sort of started the whole snowball rolling. And for a lot of people, uh, people who create your favorite software games and other programs. Uh, a lot of them sort of cut their teeth on the Commodore sixty four not which was literally because those were really big, bulky, heavy machines. I knew he was going to say that. Uh, no, they were. They got their feet wet programming. Let's use a different analogy yet, that which, by the way, I do not recommend when you're using electrical device. I knew he sin as I said. Okay, So actually the device we're talking about now, the Raspberry Pie, is created to do really very much the same thing. Yeah. In fact, there's a great backstory to this device. That's that's what I think is the really compelling part of this. Yeah. I mean, the device itself is awesome too, but the reason behind it is is fantastic. So over in jolly old England across the pond, and I promise I'm not going to do my terrible fake English accent today, a fellow by the name of even Upton, who worked in admissions at Cambridge university and also would do lectures there. He noticed a disturbing trend. Incoming students who are interested in studying computer science seemed to be to have a less of a grasp on the way computers work than previous generations of students. So, in other words, as time has gone on, people, the incoming classes seem to be more ignorant of the way computers work than the previous class, which, you know, think that's odd because we're in a world where computers are much more pervasive than they ever have been before, to the point where you might have a computer in your pants pocket, as a smartphone or a tablet on your on your desk, or or even the device you're listening to right now might very well be considered a computer. Well at, computers are in lots of things. Computers are in your car and in your fridge and in all sorts of other stuff. But the thing is, uh, today's computers, the computer computer, the one that sits on on your desktop or a laptop or desktop machine. Um, those computers just work and do everything for you. Yeah. Yeah, So back back when we're talking about the old Commodore sixty four days, those were days where you're using UH interface where it's all text based. You're typing stuff into the computer to get it to do things, and people were wondering, well, wait, how does this work? How does how does what I type in translate into this action? And how can I create my own programs knowing that there's this one language I can use to build something that that you know, when you execute a command it does something kind of cool, and you've got a lot of people getting into it and sort of a hobbyist level. Well, those people when they would go to school, some of them would say, you know, I loved tinkering with that stuff. I want to learn more about it. This is what I'm going to pursue as a career, and they became that generation of computer engineers and scientists. Well, the problem is that we've got these devices that are now so sophisticated and do so much for us that that level of tinkering has been taken out. It's really hard to tinker with a device that's running say a sophisticated graphics UH graphic user interface. You know you can't. You're not seeing the underlying programming that's making this all go, and you might very well not have very much exposure to it. And in fact, Upton's point was that he said that the students he was encountering, most of them, had little to no understanding of any programming. If they had anything, it was HTML programming, which is not really programming ht mls markup language. It changes the way stuff looks, but it's not truly a programming language, right. You know, if I may be permitted an analogy, I think it's sort of like somebody going to say, you know what, I want to become a mechanic, and somebody goes, okay, so you have a car. What makes it go? Well? I step on the gas and it makes it go. Yeah, but what about the engine? What about the parts of an engine? And they go, I don't, I don't know. The gas makes it move forward. I know that I put the groceries in the trunk and at the other end there's something exactly. And that was that was Upton's point, was that students only had a very superficial understanding of computers. They had nothing. It's it seemed like it was getting worse each year. Yeah. Now, I mean you you have computers now, um that come with programming language is built into the computer when you take it home and unwrap it and take it out of the box, it's got that stuff. But a lot of people don't even mess with it. And he wanted um, he wanted people to be able to get started programming in a very inexpensive way. Yeah, and so he Upton realized, and it's this is all stated on the Raspberry Pie Pie. It's it's stated on their on their web page. So if you go to the web page, you can actually read this whole story that we're summarizing here. But Upton's point was that he knows that access does not automatically solve a problem, no, right, but that without access you can't solve a problem. And so one of the things he thought would be important is to try and create a very very low cost computer that would give people the opportunity to really play with programming in a way that hasn't been seen. It's the days of the Common War sixty four and other computers of that era. Yes, And so he set out to try and create as an affordable a computer as possible. This is essentially it's a nonprofit approach. It's a charity approach to this, UM too, so that you could get as many of them into schools and into private hands as possible, so that people kids mostly could really get their hands on some programming and perhaps this would inspire the next generation of computer engineers. In fact, they're talking about the possibility of a buy one, send one approach in the future. Um. They as the time we're recording this in January twelve, they just started manufacturing these devices, probably within the last uh six to eight weeks from what I understand, So they're still pretty new and if you go to the shop, they are not actually in the shop. The only thing that's in the shop right now are stickers for keyboards. Um, so they might they might send one later. A lot of the places like a one laptop per Child do that where you can can purchase a machine for someone else who may not otherwise be able to afford one, and they will send it out and help somebody get started, which I think is is a nice idea. And Raspberry Pie does the same thing where you can choose pie where you can choose to actually send it to huh. You know, instead of purchasing one for yourself, you just spend the money in order for someone else to have this device. So let's talk about what the device actually is. Well, the device, Um, if you're looking for something, if you're one of those people who looks at a computer and it just works, Uh, this device maybe kind of mystifying to you because it doesn't have a case. It looks like a circuit circuit board, UM with stuff on it. Yep, it's it's kind of interesting. It is. It is. It's the heart of a computer. But it's a tiny, tiny size. Actually, I think I have the the the diagram looks it looks like this. I'll hold it up to the mic and you can do you want to look at it at the Raspberry Pie site right now, I was gonna I was gonna actually give the out the measurements. Okay, eighty five point six millimeters by fifty three point nine eight millimeters and that's length and width that for. So it's it's tiny, Yeah, it's it's about the size of a I don't know, a smartphone, a fablet. Yeah, it's the slice you did that just in my forehead. It's um, it's got, it's got a few UM interfaces soldered onto the board. Um. Of course, it's got. It's got a process or chip a Broadcom b C M five ARM chip. It's seven hundred mega hurts. It's not the fastest thing in the world. But it does have an r C A video out, an audio jack, UM USB too, an Ethernet jack on one of the two. They have an A and and B model UM. They have an h B H D M I port, micro USB for power, and an SD card slot. It also will work on batteries. Yes, four double as I think is what it will work on. But you can also use the micro USB and plug in a cable and either plug that into another device or into a wall to power it. So it's got no monitor installed, though you can hook it up to one. It's got um no, you know, it's got networking capabilities, no WiFi. It weighs forty five grams or one tenth of a pound. It does have a few L A D s to tell you how it's working. Um and UM yeah it's it's so essentially what you would do with this thing is uh, let's say that you have the Model A. Okay, so you would use an HD M I out probably for you to go out to a television or a monitor, and then you would use a three and a half millimeter headphone jack. You would plug your headphones and so you could get sound. Although like with hdm I, that's gonna carry sound too, so you can actually have sounds straight through the monitor if your monitor has UM speakers in it, So if you're using a television, you could just use the TV speakers. Uh. You would also use a USB keyboard and plug that into it, and then you've got your keyboard user interface. If you want to have a mouse, then what you would need to do is get a USB hub, plug that into a keyboard. That right, what in which case the keyboard itself as a hub. Um. But anyway, you gotta have a USB hub, possibly in the shape of a keyboard, and then you can plug your mouse into that. And the thing is that it doesn't have a hard drive on it, but you could get a have a clock on it either. Yeah, you can get an external hard drive and and plug that into it if you wanted to. Um, so you would have the using a using a lot of existing technology. You might have to actually go out and buy the keyboard. The funny thing is the keyboard might actually cost more than the Raspberry Pie. It depends on because yeah, the two models. The Model A that has no Ethernet is twenty five dollars. The model B that has eithernet is a Princely bringing the Princely back. There was a Model T and you could get it in any color as long as it's black. But that's a Ford joke. So yeah, the two models. Uh, that's incredibly affordable for a fully functional computer. And you might wonder, well, what does this computer run? These are designed to run uh, specific Linux distros. Yes, so we're not talking Windows or the mac os or or even certain Linux distributions like a Buntu do not work with it yet. It doesn't run Android at the moment. Originally it was going to run a Buntu, but then Buntu realized. The people behind a bunt to realize that they were not hitting their schedule properly, so they knew that they were not gonna be able to build in support for Raspberry Pie. Uh. They did at the top, it did sound like that. It's something that Canonical, the company behind one Too, and other distributions of Linux are are working on, but it's not currently available. The specific ones that are available at launch are Debian, Fedora, and arch Linux. Those are the three that can work right at the top of the as soon as it's ships and there have been some beta once sent out already. It also sounded like it's possible that they that that the makers of Raspberry Pie Pie would be willing to accept uh Android, but they're not going to port it themselves somebody else. If somebody else does it, they'll be cool with that. But in other words, this this is a very open source kind of approach where the community is going to provide a lot of the actual content and functionality beyond just the basics that that the foundation that has been created to do this will will do. Also, the Model A and Model B, I should mention they also have different amounts of memory. Yes, a megabytes of memory. Model B is two und fifty six megabytes of memory, and uh I think I think the Model B actually has two USB ports, which could be good because you could plug in a WiFi dongle into uh you know, one of the Raspberry Pie devices um to to give it WiFi connectivity, but it's not built into the to the board. Yeah. Yeah, That's the nice thing about USB, right is that there's so many different peripherals that use that standard that can really extend the functionality of any computer, but particularly for something like this, where it's just a very creative approach to solving this problem. So yeah, the whole goal here is that you get this device in as many hands as possible, and the Linux distros are designed in such a way that that they do kind of harken back to that common Wore sixty four day where it's it's it requires a certain level of investment on the part of the user to learn how the system works and and to really kind of explore it. Um. And that's the whole purpose of this is not you know, it's not just that it's a cheap computer that can get into the hands of people. That the ultimate purpose is to inspire people to really look into programming and learn more about it and and possibly become the next you know, genius programmer. Um. And so mainly they're going to be working with the Python programming language, but there are also other languages supported, including Basic, although it's from what I understand it's a form of Basic called BBC Basic. There's also the C programming language and Perl. So um, there will be other languages probably added in support will be added in later. Uh and UH, it's any programming language that the limitation is that the program gramming language has to have support for Linux because that's the obering system and for ARM processors. Yeah, because not every programming language works with every processor. It's one of those tricky things about computers is that you know, you've just when you think you get it all figured out, you realize that there's a hardware limitation. Yeah. But those those languages that you mentioned, for the most part, are process are neutral. I mean those those uh, you know, Python, C Pearl, those are they're all you know, cross platform. Um. And you might be saying, well, you know, you guys, that sounds pretty cool and all, but uh, you know, for the general public, why is that interesting? Well, for one thing, it gives more people a chance to try out computer programming inexpensively. I mean, this is something that if you've always wanted to do, this could be a cool way to get into uh uh to hacking and learning how to write your own software and how computers work. This is this is an inexpensive way to get your your not your feet wet, you're you're you could dive into you could try programming. But um, but yeah, there there's also another audience. That again, the Raspberry Pie people are not discouraging at all, And those are the people who already know how to do this stuff but want to try and making something else out of this little computer. And of the things I've already seen them do is messing with XMBC, which is a media center at an open source media center. Um and uh it's available again. This is cross platform you can build your own. Remember now is a podcast from a long time ago, building your own uh media media center. Um. But this and this operating system works for existing machines Lennox, Windows, mac os ten um works on all of them. But they've seen XNBC running on a Raspberry Pie. Um. So the question is what can makers do with this device. We talked about the Arduino and the micro controller board. This is another device like that, exactly in the way that you can I would say, this is this is two computers, is two circuits. Yes, so uh yeah, I've already heard about people who are interested in robotics using this as a component in in uh their next robot. I also saw a video online of a guy who had created a essentially what what it amounts to an Apple TV using this where he could he could push video from an iPad to a television through the raspberry pie pie. So yeah, so, I mean they're the applications are numerous. So and and the nice thing is at twenty five or thirty five dollars a pop, it's a really affordable component. I mean, you're talking about hobbies that you know, hobbyists in these areas are sometimes accustomed to spending multiple hundreds of dollars on on projects. So when you suddenly have, like the brains of your project is twenty five or thirty five dollars, that opens up a lot of opportunities. I mean, even if you went down to the computer store you said, I wanted to build a computer, use for my computer to have a computer cheaper than and um, I believe they're also talking about a case. So if that that's putting you off, Yeah, there's no case right now, but that there are plans for that in the future. So it's uh, because that's that's one thing some folks have said, like, well, it looks a little cluji. It looks a little like, you know, you've got this hardware. Showing that to some people just seems a little weird, like it looks like you naked circuit board. Yeah, it looks like looks like someone went crazy and took a radio apart or something, and now there's just these pieces sitting around. So there is talk about creating a case, although I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of people out there who are going to. The folks that I think really this appeals to are the same ones who will go out and build their own cases. Who will you know, you'll end up seeing like some really crazy interesting variations on cases for the raspberry pie pie. Uh and I've already seen a Lego based case. Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, of course you don't want to completely steal it off because you've got to not only provide access to the porch, but also provide a little cooling. Um, make sure a little air can get to it. But um, but yeah, I mean for considering it will take wired or wireless connections and I'm including power in that. Um, you can do all kinds of things with this little device, um, and possibly get a whole new generation of people interested in what it takes to uh to learn programming and learn what you can do with computers of all kinds. Um. You know, I think this is an excellent opportunity and I'm a great idea. Um. And the nice thing is too that all the hackers will who are buying up the machines will also provide money for the charity side, um, who can then possibly distribute these two people who are just getting started, who may not necessarily have the money to to get involved. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a it's a really cool idea. And I all, I can predict already that I'm gonna pick one of these up as I can, because I mean, for thirty five dollars, how can I not? And Uh, it would be just be cool to have something where I could, you know, have a device specifically where I'm learning to program, maybe do a couple of these hacks, uh and uh and just sort of experiment with it, you know, use it for what it was intended for, really, to to to learn about programming. And uh, frankly, I've I've while I know about programming, I've never really gotten into it on a deep level. Back when I was a kid. I started getting into it with basic, but you know, I never went far beyond the program that when you tell it to run, it prints out a picture of a cake or something, or maybe a pie. I was trying to avoid it because I think at this point people have been counting up how many times we've said pie. They've got to be exhausted by now. Well, you know, we'd have to stick with that because the cake is a lie. Yes, So this is this is seriously nifty, stuffy, um and and these things that you're learning are not just applicable to uh, this little computer, but so to other computers, and we can start to other stuff. Yeah, it's really good because it will give you the foundation the basics that you need to be able to to build more complex programs. And uh. And once you get that that foot in the door where you've got that understanding, then it's really all it's just up to you about how far you want to go. So yeah, I'm really excited to see how this develops and whether or not it ends up being a successful program. I certainly hope it is, because it's clear that that the people who are part of this foundation, their hearts are in the right place. And uh and again you know, they recognize that creating an accessible machine is just part of the problem. You can't you know, you can't just give people access to stuff and expect that to solve everything. But uh, it's a good first step. So hopefully maybe maybe in a generation or two, maybe maybe less, but maybe like in in ten years, when Cambridge is looking at the people, the students that are are lying to study computers, they're going to find that, uh they're much more um knowledgeable about the field than the folks who applied this year. No, no slight against anyone who's at Cambridge, by the way, I have I have nothing but respect for your comedy programs, but I mean that produced half of money Python Okay, but um yeah. And and another nice thing is since it is a charity organization, I feel comfortable giving out their address on the podcast, which is raspberry Pie with you know p I not the with an e um dot org. Now dot com is also also belongs to them, but that's the store specifically. If you want to learn more about the device and the and the group that that is making it and all of that, go to the raspberry pie dot org site and they won't uh provide you with all the information you need there. And I can't wait to see what kind of crazy hacks amount of all this because you know, they're gonna be people out there who are going to apply this in ways that we just can't even conceive of at this moment, and uh, and those are gonna be really awesome. It's gonna have an instant following, I think, just because it's so affordable and people are gonna want to mess with it, even people who are not necessarily uh you know, the people you would consider makers or hackers. Now I think they'll go, you know, and I can afford that I'm gonna try it. Yeah, I got an extra monitor laying around here. I can plug this thing in and go. Or heck, I've got an extra HD my cable. I can take over the TV every now and then. Yeah, I'm me. It'll be fun. So yeah, if any of you out there end up purchasing a Raspberry Pie and you start playing with it and you guys have like your own experiences, definitely let us know. Maybe we'll do a follow up episode at some point and talk about sort of the the experiences people have had with this device and sort of you know, what they've discovered with it, whether or not they found it helpful to have something like this while learning to program I would love to hear that kind of information, So hopefully in a few months we'll be able to hear back from some of you guys as you experiment with this. If you choose to go out and buy one of these um and uh, we'll revisit the topic at that point. But if you guys have anything else you would like us to talk about, any other specific subjects, you can let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled there is tech Stuff hs W or send us an email or address is tech Stuff at Discovery dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again. Really, so be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house Stuff Works. I find app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
