The first ten pre-production prototypes of the Raspberry Pi beta board are currently selling on eBay, proceeds to help Raspberry Pi build more boards for educational purposes. If you haven’t run across this project, it’s attempt to provide a low-cost educational board to schools to encourage the development of programming skills. From the Web site:
“The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”
The Raspberry Pi is based on a Broadcom Mobile Media Processor Soc, which in turn is based on an ARM 11 processor core clocked at 700MHz. There’s a 128 or 256Mbyte DRAM stacked on top of the SoC using PoP (package on package) 3D assembly techniques. The Raspberry Pi board is designed to sell for $35 or less, but these first ten beta units went onto eBay to raise money for the charity. Current price as of Wednesday afternoon: £560 and up.
Read more EDA360 Insider coverage of Raspberry Pi:
3D Thursday: Raspberry Pi Foundation’s $25 ARM board boots Linux using stacked DRAM
Friday Video: Raspberry Pi won Best in show at ARM TechCon 2011. Here’s why
EDA360 Insider 