The Raspberry Pi mini computer starts at $25

Imagine a computer slightly bigger than an Altoids box that only costs $25.  These tiny computer has been developed for kids to make it easy for them to learn how to program using Linux.  The computer hooks up to a TV and a keyboard, plays Blu-Ray discs, and runs Fedora, Debian and ArchLinux.  Hopefully kids will play around with programing like they used to in the 80’s and 90’s.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity.  The actual idea for the Raspberry Pi mini computer started in 2006 with Eben Upton, a lecturer at Cambridge University.  One of his roles also included admissions.  He noticed that the experience of applicants interested in Computer Science had changed drastically.  Rather than kids who were playing around with programming on the family computer, the current applicants had little to no experience with computer programming.
He and fellow colleagues from the university like Rob Mullins and Alan Mycroft started pondering how to get kids programming again.  Upton started building prototypes of Raspberry Pi.  In 2008, processor chips designed for mobile devices became powerful enough and cheap enough to provide good multimedia support.
The current models are the size of a credit card. An illustration of the computer can be found below. The minicomputers will do about everything a regular computer will do including word processing, spreadsheets, gaming, and playing videos.  Both models have the same components but different amounts of RAM.  The A model has 128 MB and the B model has 256 MB.  To put this in perspective, the latest cell phone models have one gigabyte of RAM so we aren’t talking computers that will do a lot of multitasking.
According to EcoGeek, the performance of the computer will be similar to a 300 MHZ pentium processor.  The actual processor in use is an ARM based system on a chip.  These should be easy to power up since they will run off of four AA batteries.  The model A will require only a 300 mA charger and the model B a 700 mA charger.  Solar power is also an option.
As mentioned earlier, the idea behind these computers is to provide a small affordable computer for kids to learn programming. The foundation has gotten a lot of interest from the educational community and developing countries.  Inquiries have also come from museums and hospitals who want to use the Raspberry Pi to run displays. Of course, people interested in building robots are interested in these little boards. While the computers are aimed at kids, they sound like they might be a lot of fun to play with for adults as well.
The first production run will be 10,000 and will go on sale at the end of this month.  Orders are limited to one per person.  The Raspberry Pi will come uncased and can be ordered from raspberrypi.com.  The model A will cost $25 and the model B, $35.
The Foundation does expect to offer a buy one, donate one option at some time in the future and as with all charity organizations, they accept donations.

Tags: computers, Fedora, Linux, Raspberry Pi Posted on: February 24th, 2012 by Susan Wilson
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Six Months of Computing Time Generates Detailed Portrait of Cloth Behavior for Video Games

Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Contact: Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice@cs.cmu.edu
PITTSBURGH—It would be impossible to compute all of the ways a piece of cloth might shift, fold and drape over a moving human figure. But after six months of computation, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are pretty sure they've simulated almost every important configuration of that cloth.
"I believe our approach generates the most beautiful and realistic cloth of any real-time technique," said Adrien Treuille, associate professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon.
To create this cloth database, the team took advantage of the immense computing power available in the cloud, ultimately using 4,554 central processing unit (CPU) hours to generate 33 gigabytes of data.
Treuille said this presents a new paradigm for computer graphics, in which it will be possible to provide real-time simulation for virtually any complex phenomenon, whether it's a naturally flowing robe or a team of galloping horses.

Doyub Kim, a former post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon, will present the team's findings today at SIGGRAPH 2013, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Anaheim, Calif.
Real-time animations of complex phenomena for video games or other interactive media are challenging. A massive amount of computation is necessary to simulate the behavior of some elements, such as cloth, while good computer models simply don't exist for such things as body motion. Nevertheless, data-driven techniques have made complex animations possible on ordinary computers by pre-computing many possible configurations and motions.
"The criticism of data-driven techniques has always been that you can't pre-compute everything," Treuille said. "Well, that may have been true 10 years ago, but that's not the way the world is anymore."
Today, massive computing power can be accessed online at relatively low cost through services such as Amazon. Even if everything can't be pre-computed, the researchers set out to see just how much was possible by leveraging cloud computing resources.
In the simulations in this study, the researchers focused on secondary cloth effects — how clothing responds to both the human figure wearing the clothes, as well as to the dynamic state of the cloth itself.
Kim said to explore this highly complex system, the researchers developed an iterative technique that continuously samples the cloth motions, automatically detecting areas where data is lacking or where errors occur. For instance, in the study simulations, a human figure wore the cloth as a hooded robe; after some gyrations that caused the hood to fall down, the animation would show the hood popping back onto the figure's head for no apparent reason. The team's algorithm automatically identified such errors and explored the dynamics of the system until the error was eliminated.
Kim said with many video games now online, it would be possible to use such techniques to continually improve the animation of games. As play progresses and the animation encounters errors or unforeseen motions, it may be possible for a system to automatically explore those dynamics and make necessary additions or corrections.
Though the research yielded a massive database for the cloth effects, Kim said it was possible to use conventional techniques to compress the tens of gigabytes of raw data into tens of megabytes, a more manageable file size that nevertheless preserved the richness of the animation.
In addition to Treuille and Kim, the research team included CMU Assistant Professor of Computer Science Kayvon Fatahalian, and, from Berkeley, James F. O'Brien, professor of computer science and engineering, Woojong Koh, a Ph.D. student, and Rahul Narain, a post-doctoral researcher.
More information, and a video, are available on the project website, http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Kim-NEP-2013-07/index.html. This research was supported by funding from the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing, the National Science Foundation, the UC Lab Fees Research Program, a Samsung Scholarship and gifts from Google, Qualcomm, Adobe, Pixar and the Okawa Foundation.
Follow the School of Computer Science on Twitter @SCSatCMU.
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In the simulations in this study (pictured above), the researchers focused on secondary cloth effects — how clothing responds to both the human figure wearing the clothes, as well as to the dynamic state of the cloth itself.

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