My, overly-impassioned, exaggerated point is that the RPi is no better that many other competing devices on the market and should me measured solely on technical/business merit. The popularity of the device has spawned a product category of itself. However, at this point in time, claiming something about education is total rubbish. Take the old Pi, run ARMv7 QEMU on it et voila you have the new Pi. There is nothing new to learn, to grow, to probe questions about. The GPIO of the device could just as easily be be provided by a USB breakout board, etc, etc. Cypress had a $4 PSOC prototype board and if anyone (especially Cypress) bothered to develop open-source tooling for it, it would have be a far more useful device to learn from.
(As an aside: thank you to HNer asb and colleagues for the lowRISC project. Also, thank you to people like "bunnie" and "xobs" for Novena. These are real people, with real projects working with the best of intentions.)
I don't wish to hijack this thread but tying the Raspberry Pi to education is terrible if you ask me.
I agreed about the Raspberry Pi being the best device for education right from day one. That was until my father bought my daughter one for her birthday and I ended up being the resident "fix it guru" for it.
The thing teaches you merely how to jump through funny shaped hoops to get something working rather than anything realistic or helpful. Most of it is google-fu and copy and paste. When you do finally get there it's a baron land of absolutely unrealistic, undocumented crud that can't self-serve. Plus it barely works and browns out to start with resulting in USB-hub jiggery-pokery (and that only happens because I actually understand how USB works).
For ref, I have 20 years' of Unix and Linux experience (right down to writing kernel drivers) and it was painful getting it off the ground so I'm not approaching it blind.
Being critical (constructively!) of this results in the RPI forum thread being deleted which in itself an affront and a general recommendation against the things.
> where are all the success stories about RPI in the educational arena
You're right; I don't see success stories in education.
But so what? The RPi is a huge success as a prototyping tool, as a platform for one-off devices or small productions runs, and as a hacker appliance (in the good sense of "hacker").
So what if the Raspberry Pi Foundation's original intention was to advance computer education? They achieved success in a different and highly positive way. There's nothing to regret.
> It's really doubtful that more than a tiny fraction of RPi sales have gone to kids. Be honest here, whatever the RPi Foundation's marketing, the overwhelming majority have gone to hobbyists.
That's great, the hard work put in by hobbyists has made the Pi an even better platform to teach the kids. And their purchases have helped financially support the educational mission. I say this as a hobbyist who started out picking up a Pi and has now directly taught kids.
> The RPi is uniquely unsuited to an educational environment anyway.
A traditional educational environment, maybe, but it's exactly those environments that have made computing such a dry and uninteresting pursuit in the first place. The computer lab at my school and college was tragic. I can only imagine how much I'd have loved to hack on a Pi, and I'm glad to be a small part of the effort to make that opportunity available to present and future generations.
> The SD cards are unreliable
I've used Pi's non-stop since day 1, and it's been a large part of my career for over 3 years. I can count the number of SD card failures I've had on one hand. I've never been particularly careful about shutting them down. I have two running on my desk 24/7 for development/testing. We've have two running in our post room, hard powered on/off every single day for 2 years. I think reports of unreliability are greatly exaggerated.
> the cheapo phone adapters
There's an official Pi power-supply for that. I certainly wont argue that terrible phone adapters are a problem though. It was the answer to every problem report on IRC for years :D
> You can't PXE boot them
The Pi 3 can PXE boot and boot without SD cards from, albeit not all, hard disks and other USB-attached storage.
> The Pi should have had eMMC day one
I think the cost of this wouldn't have helped with traction.
> shipped with a proper power adapter
Yup! Albeit, cost again. And, arguably, there are pretty good reasons not to ship a microUSB power adaptor, since most of us already have a tangled mess of them anyway from a dozen past phones. It's just unfortunate the phone ones were/are awful.
> The Pi still needs a case
It doesn't need one, but they look pretty :D Incidentally it's because someone recognised the demand for a case that I have a job that I love. Oh and people love to accessorize, so the ability for a customer to choose one to their liking is often a positive part of the experience.
> a monitor
Most people had an HDMI TV, but in retrospect the inclusion of HDMI/RCA led to a whole aftermarket of HDMI->VGA adaptors since schools are stuck in 1998. I think it's important to reinforce that learning doesn't, and absolutely shouldn't, only happen in schools.
> a proper system architecture with SATA and often USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet
To hobbyists, maybe, but then they'd have cost $100 and been another unsung bit-player like the BeagleBone Black (Disclaimer: I loved the BBB). The Pi's biggest success was shaking up market, perhaps even creating one, and gravitating a whole bunch of people to a common cause. They also proved there was a market, so now if you want those things, there are plenty of alternative choices! And then they did it again with the Pi Zero- blatantly giving the market an "we're not going to watch you hit $9, $8, $7, $6 price points just for headlines. Get to the point" shakeup. You don't have to buy a Zero, but you'd be on rocky ground if you tried to argue that your options aren't better because of it.
> Furthermore - the Pi was plagued by driver problems with its USB stack for years
Ugh. shudder memories! But largely irrelevant these days.
> it totally fails as a machine for teaching programming compared to Ye Olde White Box.
Having run several workshops using the Pi, and contributed to more, I disagree. If for nothing else other than it's different enough to not simply put people off from the get-go. "Learn programming on these boring old white boxes" is not nearly as exciting as "learn to interface the real world with minecraft on credit-card sized computer." The low cost and educational push has also enticed a wave of enthusiastic geeks out of the woodwork, eager to teach anyone who'll listen. I know and deeply respect many of them, and I've had tremendous opportunity to make a positive impact on people's lives that perhaps I wouldn't have ever realised without the Pi.
> I tried to run a pair of RPis as my fileservers for about a year and a half
Yup. They are totally awful for this purpose, or at least just barely adequate, but that doesn't reinforce that they're awful at everything else.
> running an educational PC lab
I think you perhaps have too narrow a definition of education. I think the Pi excels because it fascinates people outside of a sterile classroom environment. Nobody is going to build and battle a robot, or create a 20 square foot version of whack-a-mole, or make a power-glove controlled robot arm, or a "disco" button that explodes their living room into song and light... out of a bunch of computers PXE-booting and tethered to ethernet.
The effort put into Blobless linux is itself a fantastic example of people using the Pi to push their own boundaries and learn things. And you say it's failed at being educational? Nonsense.
I find it sad that RPI managed to suck the 'educational' market because of the price point, when the design is extremly obscure. Unless they planned to turn teenagers into hardware reverse engineer...
The point of all these people doing "Raspberry Pi" articles with basic Linux stuff is to teach people who just bought a Pi and don't know how to use it. The overall point of this device is education.
I don't understand how that's relevant. You can still release something smaller and less powerful, and still be accessible to beginners.
Why are you arguing about having standard peripherals? It doesn't let people learn about I/O.
I was in highschool and we were given given embedded hardware and were able to program it using assembly and uploading a program into it.
If you give students some very minimal embedded hardware with wifi and some terminal, they should be able to learn using that. Let them install things, maybe setup a 2D interface...
The RPi educational value is only enabled by I/O pins. I'm not sure that's really worthwhile.
The RPi is interesting because it's a powerful but cheap computer. I just wish there was much cheaper hardware to show people you can also do things with smaller stuff.
I'm referring to the OP's terminology, but it's also not entirely untrue. The intent of the Raspberry Pi was/is not to be a shortcut for tech startups who can't C++ their way out of a paper bag. It's also not like the Rpi has enough power to be of practical use to the average person, or even most atypical folks, hence it's more of a hobby or educational tool.
Good point. Anything is better than the office driven computer classes. The PI does indeed provide strong educational benefits to improve insights at the electronic level.
My only complaint, and weighted by the fact that the rpi team did deliver on most feature, quality and cost while so many ventures failed to even finish prototypes, is that the SoC is a monster. So no kid will ever use it to go further than python and gpio. A stupid forth CPU would be as good for electronics, but also teach some mathematical programming ideas (recursion, trees), basically the whole computing fundamentals.
Hm, nobody is mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Isn't this their target audience? Is it too slow, Raspbian not good enough for what they want to teach, or what's the reason?
(I'm not a teacher nor have I tried to use a Pi (although I own one, haven't had the time to play with it yet); I'm just wondering.)
Upvoted because while your comment is provocative, it's at least interestingly so.
> everything the pi is touted to do, you can either accomplish with existing general computing or something like an arduino (and as a benefit, learn some electrical theory as well.)
This may be true, but was it true when the Pi was released?
For me, the Pi sits in an uncomfortable position where it's not really the best at anything it does. It's promoted at being for education, but arguably there are better solutions, and almost certainly the overwhelming majority of Pis purchased are by individuals and businesses, so this is a kind of misleading advertising.
They included a chip for media decoding (including 4K HEVC), which is a dead giveaway that much of the draw isn't the education market, but it's shockingly limited. For instance, despite support for HDR being advertised with the release of the Pi 4, as far as I know it still doesn't work at all. High bitrate media often fails to decode in real time. So if it's a HTPC type use, you'd be much better served by an Nvidia Shield or something like that.
The emphasis on netboot support suggests that they envision enterprise use cases, but it took them forever after the Pi was released to have this working fully.
They include hardware design files that suggest it's designed for the hobbyist hardware market, but yet it's not truly open hardware at all, and in fact they've been drifting further away from that ideal over time.
If anything, the niche is probably tinkering with hardware (given the number of add-on products), without having to jump in all the way with an arduino, but how many people who buy a Pi actually end up doing any of that? In the end, I suspect a lot of people bought them for the novelty of a $35 Linux computer.
I say all that, but naturally I own 3 of them myself. :-)
Most of the comments so far seem to have missed the point of the RPi specifically, which is that it was always intended more as an educational tool than commercial solution. The idea of the RPi foundation is to promote experimenting and hacking by selling a board cheap enough that you don't care too much if you ruin it.
This was explicitly a response to the rise of smartphones(/smart-whatevers) which turned computing into magic by sealing off all the components and preventing any hands-on work - students were enrolling in to computer science degrees with nearly no understanding of how a computer is fundamentally put together.
There is no reason for RPi to change from their very successful mission - they will keep putting out the best hardware they can squeeze into their fixed price point.
I always found it odd that many seem to belittle the RPi and/or say it's lacking in power or features.
As I understood it since the beginning, the RPi is a teaching and learning tool, not your 32gb home server running git, nextcloud, plex, portainer and 15 other services. So faulting it for something it was never intended to be seems a bit unfair?
> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not.
Not most of them and not to begin with, but "educating themselves" means having a platform where their curiosity can run amok, and some kids with RPis absolutely will find the Eudyptula Challenge or some other source of inspiration and make it to tinkering with the kernel.
RPi is absolutely the perfect platform for this. Break your OS? Just throw in another SD card. Somehow damage the hardware? Whatever, it's only $35.
I'm not the only person on here who taught himself Z80 assembly language in school because it let me dig deeper into our TI calculators; if we'd been using RPis for programming assignments I would have been all over that. I think it's a little surprising that it even needs to be said on a site called "Hacker News", but let's not underestimate what curious kids with a bunch of free time will accomplish.
Yeah, from what I can tell the previous Raspberry Pi approach of a completely separate, full-on computer was ill-suited to its stated educational purpose for multiple reasons. The trouble is, the climate of, well, fanboyism around the Pi meant that this tended to be dismissed as an issue. I wonder if now everyone will discover how much better microcontroller-based boards are for this, just like everyone discovered the performance benefits of not having an ancient version of ARM when the Pi 2 came out and the practical benefits of integrated wifi when the 3 came out...
Well said. Yes, the Raspberry Pi family has its foibles, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. (My main beef: the techbro "let's change your configuration behind your back" shenanigans with the Microsoft repository, but that's a software thing.) They've been upfront about their educational mission since day one, and it's just a bonus that it took off with hobbyists. On the other hand, the widespread hobbyist adoption is undoubtedly a big factor in its success.
If nothing else, it gave ARM board makers a boot in the behind and got them to build boards that don't cost an arm and a leg. We wouldn't have sub-$100 Jetson Nanos if the Pi hadn't blazed a trail.
(As an aside: thank you to HNer asb and colleagues for the lowRISC project. Also, thank you to people like "bunnie" and "xobs" for Novena. These are real people, with real projects working with the best of intentions.)
reply