Calling all hardware hackers: the Raspberry Pi camera module has gone on sale online via Pi suppliers including RS Components and Premier Farnell/Element14, providing the eye required for all those computer vision projects you had in mind for the Pi microcomputer.
The camera module actually went on sale yesterday and is currently temporarily out of stock on RS’ website (but Element 14 appears to have stock). The plug-in module costs around £17, or about $25.
The camera module can be used with either the Model A or Model B Pi, and has a five megapixel sensor — the same size as you’d find in many a mid-range Android smartphone — and a fixed focus lens. The module supports 1080p/720p/640x480p video. Dimensions are 25 x 20 x 9mm. Weight is just 3g.
The latest version of the Raspbian firmware supports the module so Pi owners may need to upgrade to enable camera support.
The Pi Foundation has made a short video showing basic hardware set up for the camera module. Embedded below.
While the Raspberry Pi is great for educating kids about computing, can it brew a mean beer? The BeagleBone Black can. Trevor Hubbard, an engineer at Texas Instruments, uses the new, next-gen board to control heat exchangers and monitors to handle beer temperature remotely.
The board itself is quite cool. It runs a AM335x 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with graphics accelerator and has two 46-pin headers for IO, making it ideal for monitoring and robotics. The board itself costs $45 and is available now.
It can run Android and Ubuntu linux and connects to the Internet via Ethernet or a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Interestingly, the entire board is open source, allowing you to download and tweak the design to suit your needs.
The company was founded by Jason Kridner and Gerald Coley, two TI engineers. The headers allow for multiple styles of input and output including serial connectivity, timers, and digital I/O. While not as inherently simple as the Raspberry Pi, it’s still a formidable board.
Hubbard, who recorded a video about his project, shows how he can control his beer temperature remotely using a BeagleBoard, the Internet, and a taste for bubbly hops. There is, I’d wager, not much more a man could ask for.
It’s almost like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft have actually launched smartwatches. Except of course they haven’t. But who cares! Analyst house ABI Research has been stroking its collective beard and come up with a forecast for the size of the nascent smartwatch market. And — drum roll please! — it reckons you can bank on more than 1.2 million of the wrist-strapped gizmos shipping this year.
Which sounds about as plausible as any guesstimate produced prior to any mainstream tech companies actually launching product. If you’re in the business of reading tea leaves it helps if you wait for someone to make a brew before doing divinations.
ABI says its “market intelligence” of the “strong potential emergence of smart watches” — note the careful hedge, and don’t bet the farm on this one just yet — is based on the emergence over the past nine months of “a number of new smart watches”, which is likely referring to Kickstarter-funded Pebble and its myriad of wrist-coveting, crowdfunded competitors.
The analyst also says its forecast is based on ”contributing factors” that it reckons are encouraging the smartwatch market to (maybe) emerge from its Kickstarter-powered chrysalis and (possibly) blossom into a standalone butterfly — namely:
…the high penetration of smartphones in many world markets, the wide availability and low cost of MEMS sensors, energy efficient connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0, and a flourishing app ecosystem.
Even though the smartwatch market remains a partially formed, largely limp-wristed creature, listlessly stuck within its chrysalis of potential, ABI has already spotted four categories hoping to fly in the months and years ahead — aka: notification types (such as MetaWatch and Cookoo); voice operational smartwatches (such as Martian); hybrid smartwatches; and completely independent smartwatches — i.e. smartwatches that have their own OS and aren’t just playing second fiddle to a smartphone.
In the latter category, ABI cites I’m Watch as an example but also suggests that other “possible archetypes” could be “Apple’s hotly anticipated iWatch, Samsung’s Galaxy Altius and Microsoft['s 'Windows Watch', or whatever catchy name Redmond ends up bestowing on it, if indeed it ends up making such a thing at all]. If Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Justin Bieber decide to launch their own Android-powered smartwatches ABI would presumably add those in here too.
“Smartwatches that replicate the functionality of a mobile handset or smartphone are not yet commercially feasible, though the technologies are certainly being prepared,” adds senior analyst Joshua Flood in a quasi-illuminating statement of the potential factors that could influence this nascent market’s potential as the hands on our (non-smart)watches push inexorably on.
One to 1.2 million Raspberry Pi microcomputers have shipped since the device’s launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it’s impossible to say exactly where* each Pi has ended up, the vast majority of the devices sold to-date have shipped to developed nations — including the U.S. and the U.K. But the potential of the Pi as a low cost learning-focused computing platform for developing countries remains very exciting.
Last week the U.K.-based Pi Foundation blogged about a volunteer group that had taken a suitcase-worth of Pis to a school in rural Cameroon where they are being used to power a computer class. At $35 apiece, and even $25 for the Model A Pi, the Pi does a lot to break down the affordability barrier to computing — although it still requires additional peripherals (screen, keyboard, mouse) to turn it into a fully fledged computer terminal.
Asked about the global sales distribution of the Pi, the Foundation provided TechCrunch with some “very rough”, internal estimates of Pi sales to developing/emerging nations — and the figures (listed below) suggest that the first million+ Pi sales have overwhelmingly been powered by wealthier nations.
The most Pi-populous country on the developing/emerging nations list (India) can lay claim to roughly 0.5%-0.6% of total global Pi sales to-date, according to this data. While, collectively, these listed nations make up between only 1.4% and 1.7% of total global Pi shipments. So more than 98% of the Pi pie has been sold to the world’s wealthiest countries thus far.
India
6000
Indonesia
1200
Lao P.Dem.R.
600
Malaysia
3400
Philippines
500
Pakistan
100
Sri Lanka
50
Thailand
2000
Vietnam
500
Egypt
150
South Africa
2000
Tunisia
200
Zimbabwe
50
Bolivia
100
Chile
400
Colombia
20
Peru
50
There are also, of course, scores of (apparently) Pi-less developing nations that do not make this list at all. One of which – the Kingdom of Bhutan — does actually have a princely one Pi sale to its name at present, according to the Foundation. “It’s a server for Khan Academy Lite in a school, whose 64GB SD card costs more than twice what the Pi cost,” the Foundation’s Liz Upton tells TechCrunch. “We’re working on getting more out there!”
It’s likely that some of the Pis shipped to developed countries have found their way to less wealthy nations – via charities and other ‘suitcase schemes’ such as the Cameroon school project mentioned above which took out 30 Pis. Or via individual buyers seeking to avoid high import tariffs that can push up the price of bulk commercial imports (such as in Brazil).
But even factoring in some extra spread, there’s no doubt the Pi is predominantly disrupting the living rooms and schools of the developed world. Which, it should be noted, was the original ambition of the Pi founders — specifically they wanted to get more U.K. kids coding, following a national slump in interest in computer science education.
But the Pi’s unexpected popularity has generated additional momentum for the project — and even grander geographical ambitions.
“We’re weighted very strongly towards the developed world,” admits Pi founder Eben Upton, when he sends the data, but he says that this spread — or rather concentration — is something the Foundation is keen to work on. “A major challenge for us this year is to find ways of making Pi more available, and more appealing, in these [developing/emerging] markets,” he says.
The Pi hardware seems to offer huge potential to the developing world — being cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for connecting the “next billions” to the Internet. The Pi is also cheaper than another Linux-based low cost learning-focused computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop. And it has an advantage over general Linux PCs or Android tablets in being conceived and supported as first and foremost a learning environment, making it well-suited to push into schools.
As for low cost PCs in general, the netbook category — still more expensive than Pi — is facing extinction by 2015, according to analyst IHS iSuppli, which has put out a forecast today predicting zero netbook shipments within two years, and just 3.97 million units globally this year.
As the traditional desktop PC declines, it’s great to see the rise of a new computing device that, unlike the slick consumer tablets du jour, is intended to encourage hacking, tinkering and learning about hardware and software, rather than passive consumption of prepackaged apps — in the best tradition of the home computer. And a device which also, thanks to its tiny price-tag, has such huge disruptive potential.
So here’s hoping a lot more of the next million+ Pis end up very far from home indeed.
*At the time of writing, the Rastrack map, a project to get Pi-owners to report the location of their Pi and plot the owner locations on a map, was not accessible. The map is used in the feature image at the top of this post, showing a snapshot of self-reported Pi distribution in May last year
The Raspberry Pi microcomputer has already put more than a million Pis in the hands of makers, tinkerers, parents and kids in its first year on sale. Which is an impressive feat for a device that’s designed to get more people dabbling in electronics and thinking about how software works. The Pi Foundation actually wanted to create a device that U.K. kids could cut their coding teeth on. But here’s a sign of how much more potential Pi has, above and beyond its original mission: Pis are being used to power a secondary school computing lab in rural Cameroon.
In a guest post on the Pi Foundation’s blog, a volunteer from a Belgian group that raised the funds to build and equip the school writes how they took 30 Pis out to Cameroon in their suitcase and used them to create a computing lab — along with screens, keyboards and mice bought locally. This Pi-powered computing class is itself powered by an on-site generator since the school is not connected to the public power network.
The school in question — Saint Marcellin Comprehensive College — is located in a small village called Binshua, close to Nkambe in the Northwest region of Cameroon. At present the Pis are being used for teaching the children how to use office productivity software but the aim is to get the kids coding too, in time:
All of the systems run on the Raspbian image from December, with LibreOffice and CUPS installed. The Pis are currently used to teach the children the basics of working with an Office suite. But we made sure that we gave the teacher a little introduction (and a good book) on programming in Scratch. So, now we are hoping that this will get Scratch introduced in the school curriculum as well.
The school’s lab doesn’t currently have an Internet connection but that’s something the Belgian group is working to change too.
The computers are all connected in a network. The central point of the network is a router that’s ready to be connected to a WAN modem. We hope to be able to provide a connection to the internet in the near future, which would certainly bring a small revolution into this rural area. Even without an internet connection, we believe that we created an advanced computer lab in this underdeveloped area. Giving the children in the area a chance to work their way to a better future. And that is our motivation.
It isn’t a stretch to say this small, low cost, low power microcomputer has the potential to provide a first computing experience for many more people in developing countries. The Pi hardware is cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for the “next billions”. And it’s a lot cheaper than another Linux-based low cost computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop (albeit, the price of the peripherals needs to be factored it).
In the following video, a teacher at the school is shown introducing the Pi to the class, and even though she mentions Microsoft’s Windows OS the reference is not likely to put smiles on many faces in Redmond: ”This small box is not working with Windows operating system… It works with another type of operating system. It’s Linux. It’s also very popular — and it’s for free.”
