On 12/02/2013 01:28 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
I would call $10 "reasonably inexpensive", but at £25 it costs *exactly* the same as the Model A of the Raspberry Pi. You get more I/Os, but 192KB of RAM instead of 256MB. But I do like the project.
True, but comparing with the Raspberry Pi isn't really fair ;-)
Literally millions of Raspberry Pi boards have been shipped. If this Micro Python board were made in such quantities, its price would drop substantially. When he set that price point, he was assuming quantities in the hundreds, and presumably he added some margin to compensate him for his design time (all his spare time for the better part of a year so far).
And the Pi is entirely closed-source hardware. You can't make your own, and you can't redesign it or otherwise evolve the hardware. (And it cannot boot without a proprietary binary blob that outsiders cannot modify or audit.)
Things like Arduino and this Micro Python board can evolve independently of any central control, and anybody can make them. We should expect to pay a premium for this advantage, at least at the beginning.
Once the design files are released, if the hardware becomes popular we should expect many players to enter that market and the price will start a race to the bottom, just as happened with Arduino and its descendants.
BTW, I neglected to mention earlier in the thread that this hardware is fully capable of driving a graphical display and supporting a GUI. His early videos show it driving a low-res LCD, but I'm curious to find out if it could drive something like a 512x342 pixel monochrome display.
Because if it can, that means it could conceivably support a GUI as good as that of the original Macintosh. (Remember how good that was?) This board has 50% more RAM than the first Mac, more than twenty times the speed, thousands of times more storage, and thirty years' worth of further software development to tap into. (Not to mention networking, which the first Mac had no inkling of.)
The first Mac was inspired by that legendary visit to Xerox PARC. They saw a GUI there. And Alan Kay showed them Smalltalk.
I'm getting one of these boards...