[Vm-dev] Raspberry Pi Scratch with GPIO

[tim Rowledge]

> On 16-12-2015, at 7:31 PM, Ben Coman <btc at openInWorld.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I was just looking to show a friend at work programming for kids on
> the Raspberry Pi, away from my usual Smalltalk activities at home, and
> was surprised to find an article mentioning Scratch with GPIO and our
> very own Tim & Eliot, which I thought I'd share
> 
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-new-version-of-scratch-for-raspberry-pi-now-with-added-gpio/

It’s been fun for the last couple of years to be full-time working on something unequivocally good, rather than merely profitable. A couple of million kids apparently use it every week at school and home. We started off with a really slow system that got people interested but annoyed them after a short while of trying to cope with grindingly slow response; after some reworking of a fair bit of really bad code it got fast enough to keep kids interested. Then after rewriting a lot more, it was able to run on the newer VMs, which made it a bit faster still. Then Eliot & I worked on the Cog and got a bit faster still. The Pi2 came out, which also helped.

All in all, for a big Scratch project we chose as a bellwether, we went from less than 1fps of PacMan to better than 30. And it still costs just US$35. Or indeed, US$5 for the new Pi Zero, which whilst a mere single-core ARMv6 is still ~40% faster than the original hardware and so a decent Scratch-box. For FIVE DOLLARS! 40 Dorado for FIVE DOLLARS!


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- In serious need of attitude adjustment.