So today's the day. The Raspberry Pi actually went on sale, and if you tried to buy one this morning you already know how that went: total chaos. RS Components and Farnell (element14, whatever they're calling themselves this week) both had their sites crawl to a halt within minutes of the thing going live. Farnell's store was straight up down for a while. I refreshed the page probably forty times over my coffee before I gave up and went to make toast instead.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention: it's a full computer, Linux and all, on a board roughly the size of a credit card, and it costs $25 for the Model A or $35 for the Model B (that's the one with the extra USB port and an Ethernet jack, which honestly is the one everybody actually wants). No case, no power supply, you bring your own SD card for storage. You plug it into a TV over HDMI or composite and a keyboard and you've got yourself a machine. Thirty five dollars. I keep having to say that number again because it still doesn't feel real to me.
I've been half-following this project since some of the early demo videos showed up last year, the ones where Eben Upton was running Quake 3 on a prototype board that looked like it belonged in a school science fair. My assumption at the time was this would stay a nice hobbyist toy that maybe a few thousand people cared about. Today proved that assumption wrong in about ninety seconds flat. The demand today wasn't "a few thousand people," it was apparently everyone with an internet connection and a soldering iron in a drawer somewhere.
Here's my actual complaint though, and its a small one: I don't think anyone was ready for this, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation themselves. Farnell sold out immediately. RS was taking orders but with zero clarity on when boards would actually ship. If you're going to build hype for over a year you'd think the fulfillment side would be a little more buttoned up on day one. I'm not mad about it, I get that a tiny nonprofit-adjacent project probably didn't budget for "entire internet shows up at once," but it's a rough first impression for something this exciting.
Anyway. Assuming I ever actually get one in the mail, my plan is to turn it into a dumb little media box hooked up to the TV in the spare room, nothing fancy, just XBMC or whatever equivalent exists for ARM at this point and a way to dump video files onto it over the network. Thirty five bucks for that seems almost stupid. I paid more than that for the HDMI cable.
Also worth a mention, since it happened just two days ago and I never got around to writing about it: Nokia showed off the 808 PureView at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The headline spec is a 41 megapixel camera sensor with a Carl Zeiss lens, which is a genuinely absurd number on a phone, especially one running Symbian Belle of all things. I have zero interest in Symbian at this point in 2012, that ship has mostly sailed as far as I'm concerned, but the camera tech itself sounds like it's doing something actually new rather than just bumping a spec sheet number for marketing. The idea, from what I've read, is oversampling all those pixels down into a much cleaner smaller image rather than just producing giant 41MP files you'd never use. Curious whether that pixel-binning approach shows up in phones I'd actually consider buying somewhere down the line, because on a phone running an OS that's basically on life support it's kind of wasted.
Two very different kinds of hardware news in the same week: one is a $35 board aimed at getting more kids (and adults, lets be honest, its mostly going to be adults for the first year) poking around with code and electronics, the other is a flagship phone camera pushing megapixel counts into territory that sounds made up. Not sure those two things have much to say to each other except that hardware's clearly still where a lot of the interesting stuff is happening, even with how much attention software and apps soak up these days.
Going to keep hitting refresh on the Farnell order page for the rest of the afternoon. Wish me luck.