Rasberry Pi: $25 Mini PC Fits in Your Pocket

Posted 05/06/2011 at 2:09pm | by Paul Lilly

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The Rasberry Pi Foundation is a U.K. registered charity whose goal is to promote the study of computer science and related topics, particularly at the school level. Part of the idea is "to put the fun back in learning," but what's most impressive is what this organization was able to cook up. Rasberry Pi's first product is a $25 PC about the size of a USB stick that's able to be plugged into a TV or combined with a touchscreen for a low cost tablet.

Rasberry Pi's mini PC flexes an ARM11 processor clocked at 700MHz, 128MB of SDRAM, USB 2.0, 1080p decoding, composite and HDMI output, a multi-card slot, OpenGL ES 2.0, general purpose I/O (12MP camera module shown hooked up in the picture above), and Linux. Students won't be able to run Crysis on this thing, but will be able to crack their programming knuckles, as well as surf the web.

David Braben, a British game designer who developed the device, says kids can use it "to run Twitter, Facebook, whatever. But also to be able to understand the whole process of programming. A lot of things have been obfuscated these days in the sense that you can't get at them. There's so much between you and doing something interesting or creative that it gets in the way. And hopefully this device will be one of the pieces that helps change that."

Comparisons to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project are inevitable, except that Braben's device is far cheaper, at least for now. Before Rasberry Pi can distribute its mini PC to children in the U.K. and third world countries, it has to fine tune the prototype.

Rasberry Pi Homepage

Image Credit: Rasberry Pi Foundation