Tuesday, March 14, 2017

For Pi Day (3.14) - Looking Back on 5 years of Raspberry Pi Tinkering



Not by me, thank God! No, the five years of Rasp Pi maso-tinkering were done by Thorin Klowsowski.  His report appears here:

http://lifehacker.com/what-i-ve-learned-from-tinkering-with-the-raspberry-pi-1793236686

In the second and third paragraph, he confirmed all my suspicions:

The Raspberry Pi is far, far away from being as user friendly as a PC or Mac. That’s a feature, not a bug... Before hobbyists latched onto the Raspberry Pi, it was a computer for learning how to code targeted mainly at kids. Since then, the appeal has broadened, but it’s still impossible for a project to “just work” out of the box. You will have to tweak something, dig into the command line, or spend a few hours buried in an obscure internet forum to find solutions to problems that only you seem to be having. You will slam your head against the wall, yell a little, and throw your Raspberry Pi at least once for every project you attempt to make.

I told you so. 


3 comments:

  1. Not much different than your homebrew projects, many don't work until you spend a few hours buried in an obscure internet forum to find solutions to problems. I am enjoying my RPi 3, had it for a few days now. Trying to get my RTL-SDR dongle working with it.

    Ed KC8SBV

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  3. If you're interested, the Pi just became the 3rd biggest selling general purpose computer, just passing the Commodore 64.

    https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-sales/

    The Commodore C64 took 11 years to sell 12.5 million units.
    Pi (cumulatively all models, but 3B is already 30% of the total) did it in about 5 (Spring 2012 to Spring 2017). Yeah, they fudge a tiny bit by combining models, but... it's still an AMAZING feat.

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