[ros-dev] Rasberry Pi

[Artanis]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Alex Ionescu <ionucu at videotron.ca> wrote:
> It's a generation-lagging ARM11 -- Windows and iOS don't support these kind
> of chips anymore (called ARMv6) because of major lacking functionality. The
> ARMv6K (which I'm not sure the Pi uses) is probably the minimum you'd want
> to use, and I know the ROS ARM port was retargeted to ARMv7 which has been
> out for almost 3-4 years now.
>
> The PandaBoard, which is 179$, so definitely more expensive, is a much
> better platform for such a port -- it's an A9/v7 (successor to A8/v7,
> successor to ARMv6K, successor to ARM6...) and has dual-core, 1GB of RAM, a
> GPU, a DSP, and more... still a bargain for 179$ if you ask me though.
>
> Best regards,
> Alex Ionescu

I would think that the raspberrypi pi is an excellent "base" platform
for the ARM port of ReactOS, it's a board designed and oriented to be
affordable and help (young) students to get into development, that
means it's main objective is to have a couple of them in every
classroom possible, and I'm sure most teachers would be more willing
to include something like that in their classes if they could just
give the students something that feels familiar with what they have at
home(windows most of the time). The way I see it, when you have only a
couple of hours per week to teach kids how to program, teaching them
the basics of linux and dealing with linux specific problems could be
a deal breaker for a lot of teachers, but if they were to have a
""windows-like"" environment and lightweight IDE in a image that "just
works" out of the box, I think a lot of teachers would be willing to
give it a try.

Apart from that, while the pandaboard is great for the price(I bought
a beagleboard for that money a couple of years back and I still think
it was a good deal), the raspberrypi pi falls under a "impulse buy"
price tag and will provably sell hundreds/thousands more than the
pandaboard, making it a more affordable and widely available way to
get ReactOS to as many new users(and hopefully, developers) as
possible.

Also, in the hobbyist front, those kind of users are usually more
willing to put up with alpha/beta quality software and help with bug
reports and generally get more involved with the community.

Of course I'm not dev, regular irc/forum user or anything and I might
be terribly misinformed(or clueless) about a lot of things ReactOS
related.