[conspire] Wondering about the "parallela" Ubuntu board

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ross Bernheim (rossbernheim at speakeasy.net):

> Simply put, if the hardware can do your job, then pick the one with
> the best software and community support.
> 
> Life is too short to fight hardware and software. Hardware is
> inexpensive. $35 to $65 will buy a lot of hardware these days.

What you said.  If dipping into ARM-based small-device computing, I
would be very careful to stick with the safety-in-numbers principle
unless I were happy to waste untold hours dealing with frustrations and
lengthy debugging -- which I'm not.

> The Raspberry Pi has sold over three million Pi’s and has a huge
> support community. It comes with the Wolfram language as part of the
> Raspian distro. There are a number of other distress available with
> more being added. The Pi has gone well beyond critical mass. Do note
> that the Pi is far from perfect. It has no real time clock, serial is
> +5V not RS232. Both of these can be overcome with a small board for
> about ten dollars if it is important for your use. If you need to talk
> to a large amount of hardware, then use the communications library to
> talk to an Arduino to handle that which it does better.

If interested, one should also spend time reading relevant discussion
forums to discover common problems and mistakes.  Reportedly, one of the
very most common mistakes with Raspberry Pi is relying on it (more than
very minimally) to power external devices over USB.  Suck too much
current, and the Pi will become either unreliable in operation or
physically damaged.

Used within its capabilities (e.g., maxing out at 256 or 512MB RAM,
depending on model), the Pi is a major phenomenon in muliple areas of
application.  Me, I'd need a compelling reason to opt for anything else.