The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that its Model A computer is (finally) available for purchase in Europe. The Raspberry Pi Model A is the small computer that the foundation originally pitched as the low-cost $25 PC. The other computer is the Model B, which has been available for some time now. The Model A is a stripped down version of the Model B covered previously. It features a single USB port, and half of the RAM of the latest Model B at 256MB. Further, there is no Ethernet jack on the model B, so users wanting Internet access will have to grab a USB NIC.
The Model A PC. Notice the lack of Ethernet support.
The Model A is powered by the same Broadcom BCM2835 chipset as the Model B. That includes an ARM1176JZFS processor clocked at 700MHz and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of hardware accelerating H.264 video decodes at up to 1080p30 and 40Mbps video. The GPU is rated at 24 GLOPS general compute performance, and it supports the OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.
Interestingly, the Model A was originally planned to have a mere 128MB of RAM, but with the update of the Model B to 512MB RAM, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was also able to include twice the RAM in the Model A while maintaining the $25 price point.
The underside of the Raspberry Pi Model A.
The Model A reportedly uses as much as a third of the power as the Model B, which makes it ideal for projects that will run off of battery or renewable energy sources–like solar. The Raspberry Pi Foundation suggests that the Model A will be useful in robotics and networking projects, for example.
The Model A Raspberry Pi PC is currently available in Europe, but US availability is coming soon. It will cost $25, but you will also need at least an SD card for the operating system and a DC power source (like a cell phone wall charger with male micro USB connector). The promised $25 PC is finally here (at least for those on the other side of the pond). What will you be using it for?
Read more about the Raspberry Pi at PC Perspective.
are there micro power
are there micro power supplies? Anyone supply a newegg link?
If the computer itself is ultra small but needed periphs liks ssd, case, psu are relatively large, i don’t see much use for this thing.
does this have any real world
does this have any real world practical applications?
can this be used to make something similar to a jailbroken apple tv where you can laf XBMC etc?
Does this thing run Ubuntu Linux?
would love to see you guys build an Apple TV clone and discuss like you did for your hackintosh on your podcadt.
I have been slowly looking
I have been slowly looking into these boards. It’s designed for a Linux OS where 3 version are supported by the community.
Because running Windows XP on it is not well supported (some hacks out there), it won’t work for a particular project (now cancelled).
Another project which I’d like to try this for is a compact IP WebCam System. It has been done by some members in the community (Bird Watcher), however it does seem to require a lot of labour to get it going. I have read that XBMC is possible, but not sure if that is where I want to go with this system.