On 05/03/2012 10:23, BartC wrote:
"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
BartC wrote:


"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
Since the Raspberry Pi will be with us soon-ish (well, about six
weeks I
am told, for mine) does anyone have any interesting ideas about what
they
might do with it/them?

And what's special about it that it took six years to develop? (I
used to
build prototype computer boards in a week or so.)

It isn't a computer board. Its custom chips. On a board.

How many chips have you ever designed?

One. (A simple graphics controller in the 80s, which I then prototyped with
some 120 TTLs and some RAM. But I wasn't happy about it as a product and it
wasn't committed to a gate array chip.)

In this case, they don't seem to be creating anything new, just combining
existing technologies (ARM processor, Broadcom video, Linux OS and so on).
Six years just seems a long time (admittedly some of that will be
organising
large-scale production).

Six years is a long time, and I expect if you started with a spec for
what it is now, and said "go build this", it would be much quicker.
However part of the exercise was defining the problem they were trying
to solve in the first place, not just finding the solution.


--
Cheers,

John.

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