Blog posts by pauljclarke

One of the key things the Raspberry Pi team have pushed is that this is a tool for education. As someone who has teached kids electronics, judges in a local engineering contest and works for ebmpapst who push and support education and getting more engineers into industry, I have decided I would look at the Raspberry Pi not as a engineer, but as a student of all ages.

The small compact size and low cost has a significant interest for schools, colleges and universities. Cost is everything and it's becoming far too common for computing and engineering to be teached with simulators and not real hardware. If a student break a bit of equipment - and they do! then its not a big cost to replace. Some would argue that you need a keyboard and screen maybe a mouse too but these are already in place for most education facilities so not a real big issue.

The real draw however for students is having real hardware. I came through education with a floppy disk in the back of my folder to keep my work on. With the SD card you can see this working just as well. Students can move around with their own Linux build, data and files knowing that it will just plug in and work because each Raspberry Pi is identical in hardware.

The board offers more than just one field of interest for education too. First we have the electronics students (like I was) that can play … Read more

The Raspberry Pi (aka Raspi) was released back at the end of February but here we are weeks later with no real hardware. We engineers are only interested in the guts of this product. So RS sent me a beta board to look at to answer the question : What is there for a engineer in the product? Well it’s time to fix that and let a real engineer at the real hardware and see if its worth opening a tin of custard for this bad boy or not!?

Since the end of February we have had to wait while shipping delays and the wrong connector have delayed us getting our hand on real boards. Then with so much hype, people from outside the engineering community came flooding in wanting boards also. This changed the whole ‘its just a Development board’ thing into a product that needs CE and FCC approval. This has then dragged on for what has seemed forever but in just the last few days we have good news. The team at Raspi has got the PASS they needed and in the next few days we should be getting the OK from both RS and Element14, then they can finally start shipping boards.

My view from the beginning was however was that this is a development board, a platform to work with and develop on. So the question really is what can you do with a Raspi that you can't get with a old pentium PC running linux? Read more

I was very excited some time back when I got my hand on the new DE2 Development and Education Board from Terasic. Following my review of the DE0-nano back in July last year I have been playing with lots of different FPGA kits and this looked like a very exciting bit of kit - but just how good is it and is it right for youngsters as the name suggests?

So it would be unfair to let a old hack like me get there hands on this without using some fresh young blood to look at it also. So I have enlisted the help of my son to go through the setting up and using of this kit. He may be considered a little young at 14 for this kit but as he writes his own PHP / MYSQL and programmes mbeds so I guess he qualifies as the right sort of person Terasic are aimming this kit at. That being the college and university students with some background in electronics and computing already.

So as per normal the whole out the box experience is second to none with Terasic. Very well boxed and shipped in anti-static shielding bags. CDs and leads supplied all to get to off the starting block. The board come with an Read more

Many of us sit and complain about how well products work, point out there issues and bad point but few spend time doing something about it. In this review I look at just such a product, designed by engineers because they were not happy with what had gone before - that product is BoardX from Upgrade Industries.

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