News - Fancy an Ice Cream Sandwich with your Raspberry Pi?

[HEXUS]

Google's Android 4.0 OS heads to the ever popular mini-computer, with full acceleration.

Read more.

[edvinasm]

Still just a toy..

[watercooled]

As opposed to what?

It's intended as an educational tool first and foremost, which it does very well.

[mike306dt]

The devices capabilities are looking very good! If it can happily run tvcatchup on android I'd be made up with one.

Our freeview signal shown some wind or rain turns to zilch!

[wombat]

With the right OS on it I imagine it would make for a pretty versatile 'smart tv' add on. There is some nice more powerful alternatives appearing but you can't really argue with the price of this thing.

[aidanjt]

It's intended as an educational tool first and foremost, which it does very well.

Exactly, it was intended to be a cheap-as-chips throw-away device kids could mess around with, and it didn't really matter if they broke it, or just lost interest in it.

Any expectation of high performance completely misses the point.

[stavroshamster]

I'm using mine with RaspBMC (XBMC for RPi) and it works great. 4OD without any adverts; iPlayer; music streaming from my computer upstairs to my surround sound system in the living room and controlled by my phone. Pretty good for a £30 'toy' methinks :-)

[cjs150]

I was impressed, I remain impressed. This has the potential (with a nice case) to be the perfect media streamer. Personally I would use XBMC with it rather than Android but that is just me.

If only I had time to play with coding on it I would get one

[Brewster0101]

I'm using mine with RaspBMC (XBMC for RPi) and it works great. 4OD without any adverts; iPlayer; music streaming from my computer upstairs to my surround sound system in the living room and controlled by my phone. Pretty good for a £30 'toy' methinks :-)

dam, thats a great idea...

Where can I buy one.

[stavroshamster]

Here: http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi

Or here: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalD...id=raspberrypi

I got mine from the latter; you'll probably have to sign up to a waiting list though.

[crossy]

Still just a toy..

And ...?
Remember it's designed as an inexpensive way to get the kids interested in something other than pirating the latest angry birds clone (horrible generalisation I know - and very, very unfair). And it's not that underpowered compared to a budget smartphone or tablet.

I'm fascinated to see what the hacker (proper use of the word, not the tabloid press version) community can make of this. I've already seen some talk of perhaps using it to power an automated weather station for example, someone else proposed a version of the old O2 Joggler. A third article suggested that these are cheap enough to be able to be used to teach cluster programming inexpensively.

Shame though that someone couldn't get iOS on it too - as I can't see any real drawback for Apple in allowing this, and quite a lot of advantages.

[bledd]

I'm holding off getting one until there's a one click installer for a video/music player that 100% works.

Then, I'll tape it to the back of my TV

[AGTDenton]

My only question is, will you have to buy a Raspberry PI with Andriod already on or will you be able to buy an SD card with it on?

[HalloweenJack]

so they can get ICS on a this , but cant get it on a samsung galaxy s phone.....

[crossy]

so they can get ICS on a this , but cant get it on a samsung galaxy s phone.....

If you mean the i9000 model then a quick look at xda-devs (http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=665) should slake your hunger for Ice Cream. Heck, I'm sure I even saw a Jelly Bean or two.

Moral of the story being that just because Samsung can't be ... donkeyed ( ) to do it, doesn't mean that it's impossible.

Now whether ICS would run "well" on the Galaxy S is another matter - note that the article states that the Raz Pi and Ice Cream has hardware acceleration enabled.

But you're point's well made - if RPi folks can "do" ICS on a proudly low-spec device then why on earth can't the phone manufacturer's do it on more powerful hardware?

[watercooled]

I'm fascinated to see what the hacker (proper use of the word, not the tabloid press version) community can make of this. I've already seen some talk of perhaps using it to power an automated weather station for example, someone else proposed a version of the old O2 Joggler. A third article suggested that these are cheap enough to be able to be used to teach cluster programming inexpensively.

Check out the raspi homepage, it's constantly updated with what some people are using it for, everything from sending one up to near-space attached to a weather balloon, with GPS/camera/etc, to low power servers and so on.

Shame though that someone couldn't get iOS on it too - as I can't see any real drawback for Apple in allowing this, and quite a lot of advantages.

Can't see it ever happening, Apple source code is very closed source. At best you'd just end up with an SD image where you could use a butchered version of the OS with a mouse/keyboard and not be able to do anything terribly useful. It wouldn't really offer any advantages to users over open-source platforms.

My only question is, will you have to buy a Raspberry PI with Andriod already on or will you be able to buy an SD card with it on?

It boots from the SD card only, so yeah it would need to be on one, but it would be a free image you could download; android is FOSS.