Since we’ve just had a Raspberry Pi anniversary, you might think that it’s excessive to trumpet another Pi-related holiday just one week later, but, well, Tuesday was Pi Day, this is the internet, and I’m afraid that’s just the way these things go.
OK, so Pi Day isn’t, strictly speaking, a Raspberry Pi thing – around these parts, it’s more of a pie-in-the-face thing – but that didn’t stop the Raspberry Pi community from getting in on the act. The estimable Alex Bate over at the official Raspberry Pi Foundation blog put together a graphic to make sure everyone understands certain key points of terminology.
Everybody got that straight? No more ice cream on your Raspberry Pi, and no more being surprised that your actual raspberry pie doesn’t run Debian very well. (Probably not at all, to be honest. Have to recompile the kernel and everything.)
And anyway, if you did get the two confused, Lifehacker’s Florin Klosowski, who wrote an interesting article about his five years tinkering with the Raspberry Pi, could probably help you fix everything.
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Here comes the competition, part 77,098 – an IndieGoGo project called the LicheePi promises to be a $6 alternative to the Raspberry Pi, complete with 1GHz processor, LCD connector, 64MB of RAM and the usual sort of wide-angle expandability you’d expect from a single-board computer with a bunch of GPIO pins…wait, it doesn’t ship with those. (You can add them yourself, however.)
There are plenty of worthy alternatives to the Raspberry Pi – most fill some sort of closely related niche role, whether they’re capable but also more expensive, or pack some kind of connector that the Pi doesn’t – but the word that springs to mind for the LicheePi is “knockoff.” It sits at roughly the same price as the Raspberry Pi Zero that it purports to emulate, but lacks some horsepower and requires add-on boards to do the same things.
(The IndieGoGo project is here – all the usual crowdfunding caveats apply. H/T: TechRepublic)
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The stated goal of the Raspberry Pi project has always been to be an educational tool, and the University of California–Davis got in on the action this week with the announcement that its free C-STEM software suite for teaching science, technology, engineering and math would be available for use on the Raspberry Pi for free.
The software will be released as C-STEMbian, a Linux distribution based on the Pi-native Raspbian, and as a package for Raspbian itself.
“Anything we can do with Windows or Mac computers, we can now do with Raspberry Pi,” said Harry Cheng, a UC-Davis professor and director of the C-STEM Center.
(Source: UC-Davis)
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Everybody’s searching for a new place to put a virtual assistant these days, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when, having already tapped hockey pucks, cars, phones and laptops, somebody went straight to animatronic skulls:
Put Project Yorick (which, for the record, is a really good name) together with one of those candy dishes with the motion-sensor hands, and you’re on your way toward a pretty good skeletal assistant. Maybe get the good people at Boston Dynamics on the case to really freak people out. Internet of SCREAMS, is more like it.
(H/T: The Inquirer)