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Open Source Businesses

As Raspberry Pi Sales Skyrocket, Eben Upton Applauds Efforts of Open Hardware Community (techrepublic.com) 41

Posted by EditorDavid from the efforts-of-everyone dept.
"Sales of Raspberry Pi's single-board computers hit 640,000 in March, the second-biggest month for sales since they started selling," reports TechRepublic, "as consumers flocked to inexpensive ways to work and learn from home." But that's not all, Eben Upton tells them: With the pandemic having highlighted shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), 3D-printing manufacturers and hobbyists have been building face shields printed on plastic acetate that can be quickly assembled and delivered to hospitals, for free. "A lot of that is Pi-driven," Upton explained, noting that OctoPrint, which is the most popular platform for managing 3D printers, runs on Raspberry Pi... "[M]aking face shields seems to be a community effort. You have people with a home printer, printing these things once a week and then going to a post office and sending them," he said.

"Then you'll have some people sat in a hack space receiving the parcels, cutting the acetate and the elastic, assembling them into face shields then sending them to the hospital. It's amazing." Upton suggested this effort could eventually be ramped up to a "massively distributed scale", with the benefit of open source being that, once you have a good design that works, it can be rapidly iterated. In the long term, this could even include the ventilators themselves, he said.

"One thing we're seeing with this is people finding a niche within which open hardware really works," he said.
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As Raspberry Pi Sales Skyrocket, Eben Upton Applauds Efforts of Open Hardware Community More

As Raspberry Pi Sales Skyrocket, Eben Upton Applauds Efforts of Open Hardware Community

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  • 640,000 you say? (Score:3, Funny)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @12:43AM (#59964160) Journal
    The Pi had a good run. 640K should be enough for everybody...

    • Haha - good one!

      So ... in 20 years, will Pi monthly sales hit 8G? One new Pi per person per month :-)

      "Son, I replaced the buttons in your yellow shirt ... with Button-Pis... their microphones and sensors support voice and gesture and track heart-health"

    • Your comment made my day!

    • ...as consumers flocked to inexpensive ways to work and learn from home

      Riiiight, all those people are using them as terminals so they can log into their Windows PC remotely and work from home...

      More likely they're using them to run MAME.

      • I'm using my Pi (w/ an extra ethernet dongle) to split my home lan into 2 subnets and do some serious bandwidth restriction on my kids subnet so I can actually do remote work during the day.

    • Iterate on a ventilator until you make one that is easy enough to run it puts RTs out of a job, or maybe one that kills fewer people than commercial ventilators. (Barotrauma is a real danger.) It would definitely show medical governing boards how wrong they are for having such tight restrictions over the medical market! (Closed source kills!)

    • *rimshot*

  • Obviously (Score:4, Funny)

    by fuzznutz ( 789413 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @12:44AM (#59964162)

    Sales of Raspberry Pi's single-board computers hit 640,000 in March

    640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone

  • its airborne virus (Score:3)

    by catmistake ( 814204 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:11AM (#59964216) Journal
    While I applaud the enthusiastic and generous collaboration, unless these face shields are airtight (or used in conjunction with a respirator), they cannot possibly be protective against airborne virus. They instead would be useful for infected patients to help prevent their coughs and sneezes from aerosolizing the infection.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Depends on the nation and their use of PPE.
      Some have protection against direct contact in a suit design. A national stockpile of tested suits.
      Some have domestic quality PPE production. Thats tested to work as PPE. A national stockpile and later the gov buying up private sector domestic production.
      Domestic testing of all PPE in use.
      Other nations took a while to understand what PPE can do and what is needed.
      The no stockpile nations. Did not read the expiry date on PPE and did not buy new PPE over the
    • How do they sterilize the equipment? There is no point in shipping a hospital protective equipment swarming with microbes.

    • Airborne means that it is carried on evaporated fluids or dust particles, not just sneezes. Last I heard they had not established that Covid was airborne. Do you know otherwise?

      • Airborne means that it is carried on evaporated fluids or dust particles, not just sneezes. Last I heard they had not established that Covid was airborne. Do you know otherwise?

        I know otherwise. Beyond being ambiguous with "they had not established...," you have employed a bandwagon fallacy. You have also committed here a fallacy of definition, specifically incongruity fallacy, because the definition you assume is excessively strict with parameters, your definition is overly narrow. Likewise, defining a "rectangle" as "a shape with four perpendicular sides of equal length" is inappropriate because it is too narrow, as it describes only squares while excluding all other kinds of re

  • A System Monitor Display.
    https://www.tomshardware.com/n... [tomshardware.com]
    Dual gigabit ethernet soon?

    • A System Monitor Display. [link] Dual gigabit ethernet soon?

      Heavens to Betsy@llc.com.aq
      You're not selling Soma after all!!!
      I have been woefully misinformed.
      But I'm afraid you'll have to surrender your satirical universe ID and report to the offices of "Your client app can never be too rich or too thin department of appliances and things that snap" located at any convenient coin-changer kiosk located nearest you. Whistle the opening stanza to the Star Spangled Banner while humming John Williams' 1978 Superman theme song (it's much easier than you think) and wait for

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        A system monitor display is a great use for a Pi next to a desktop computer.
        Think of the office use day to day.
        All that heat seen on a nice GUI and complex math getting work done.
        A nice waveshare 7 inch screen.

        That ethernet waiting for a dual gigabit ethernet Pi.
        Think of the network information on GUI in real time.
        Another nice waveshare 7 inch screen.
        Thats two productive Pi projects in use day to day for office work.

  • With the specs of a RPi 4, you can run a reasonable desktop environment with minimal power draw.

    I just have one for a server at this point, but am seriously considering replacing my desktop computer with one, and just power on the desktop if I'm doing something that needs extra CPU resources.

    Would be fun if they made these easily chainable so you can create a cheap beowulf cluster...

    • Would be fun if they made these easily chainable so you can create a cheap beowulf cluster...

      ~MMC Monster

      These words of thy...my fingers know their form, but not a substance, my ears an echo, but not a call.
      What can they mean?
      Maidens of Bayeux and fashioned men come and go, muttering functions in Forth.
      Lisps of Antonio Banderas asking,
      Why do they want us to think they are bears?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      I hear that every freaking time a model comes out, but here's the reality is even with 4 gigs of ram, without swap space its going to crash as soon as you load a web browser, and you are in a ecosystem where 90% of the people buying the things never heard of linux without it being attached to pi scratching their head thinking "but that doofer on slashdot said it could run a reasonable desktop enviroment"

      • You are spreading the usual Wintel F.U.D. "only cooking plate-grade processors are useful". I am writing this on a Teres Netbook, which runs on a similar CPU as the RPI 4. I use an RPI as my personal cloud server. Works like a breeze.

      • You can probably run chromium in 4GB if you don't run anything else.

        But you're right that it would be stifling.

        I consider 16GB RAM to be a minimum for a desktop without swap. Maybe 8 with swap on ZRAM

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I run Firefox with about 10 tabs open and it's just fine in 2Gb (Ubuntu MATE). I can run other undemanding workloads (torrenting etc.) alongside it and it still doesn't start swapping.

    • There are quite a few projects that make them able to be clustered. You can just plug a bunch of them into a switch, which might work quite well now that they have Gigabit ethernet, or you could look into something like turing pi [turingpi.com] project which allows you to use easily combine Raspberry Pi compute modules to make a mini cluster.

    • I'm seriously considering replacing my Internet-facing server with a RPi 4 and an NVMe SSD...

      Main thing is that I want a distribution that starts out minimalist and lets me add only the exact packages I need, so I don't have to remove massive piles of stuff that aren't necessary. If it's not installed, it can't be cracked. I'm currently running Gentoo for that exact reason, but I'm not sure how practical building the world from source would be on a Pi.

  • Open Hardware with an closed source SoC? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tronicum ( 617382 ) * on Sunday April 19, 2020 @08:54AM (#59964950)
    Its funny that he praises "Open Hardware" but celebrates his SoC that is pretty proprietary when it comes to pretty much everything (CPU, GPU, Binary Firmware, etc.)

    • Yes but no one cares. Proprietary SoCs are a fact of life when you want to cram that much performance into a small form factor. The "open hardware" he is talking about is the reason that the Raspberry Pi has hundreds upon hundreds of accessories "hats", and thousands of libraries to do whatever the heck you want with all I/O on the hardware.

      Performance wins over idealism.

    • Instead we should use an Android or an iOS device, where we are totally shackled to the whims of the $$$corp with no root account ? Of course we should be 100% under surveillance by the corporations, because this makes the money wheel spinning ? Get yourself a Freedom Computer: https://www.olimex.com/Product... [olimex.com]
    • If he is talking about 'open hardware' SoC computers then surely he is praising the Beaglebone Black [beagleboard.org]?

      And AFAIK the only true 'open hardware' at the moment would be IBM's Power9 [wikipedia.org] hardware, which is currently server-only.
  • The Teres Netbook/Laptop from OLIMEX is another great piece of computing hardware, just like the RPI. + It runs a version of Debian on an ARM 64 bit processor. + No keylooger, unlike a certain commercial OS. + No tracking of websites visited by the device. + Full root access for me, no golden cage. + Entire device is open-sourced, except the semiconductors, which is much better than most devices out there. + All spare parts can be bought when needed + Designed in Europe, assembled by Yourself. No need to

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