
If you’re waiting for delivery on a Raspberry Pi and are eager to learn what it’ll take to program it, Element-14, one of the distributors of the highly anticipated credit card-sized computer, will be broadcasting a webinar this morning that you’ll be interested in. Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, will show how to download and install the OS, run a boot up script, and create applications using Python scripts. This way, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running before you even have the hardware in your hands.
Programming the Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton
Wednesday, April 4, 2012, 10am ET / 7am PT


I still plan on getting one, but I would love to see some more info on what to/not expect from it.
Comparisons to common computing platforms for example would be great, i.e. about as fast as a xxxMhz-Pentium(x) . What about RAM? Is it using the SD card for RAM or does it have it’s own and if so, how much? I know it has HDMI video out, but does it have enough horsepower to run video at full speed?
According to their web site FAQ Page,
“The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s”
“graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2″
It also has 256MB of RAM. SSD is used for non-volatile storage (AKA, instead of a Hard Drive).
The system can definitely handle full speed video. I’ve seen many demos and reports of the hardware running 1080p video output flawlessly. If video is your main interest with this product, you may want to check out projects like RaspBMC, which is an operational port of XBMC that apparently runs very smoothly on the R-Pi. There are a few other media center software projects and ports floating around already, and I’m sure more will be forthcoming as the hardware gets into the hands of more developers.
Thanks both for the reply. That is exactly the kind of info I was looking for.
You have to give up personal information in order to see this on the e14 link. FAIL!
So? Make it up if you want to. No need to be so tin-foil hat.
Wow, your site is so broken on iPads. We don’t need stupid mobile versions, and frankly they all break at some point.
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