Raspberry PI

[Ken Corey]

Hrm...communication would seem to be a given already, isn't it? Can't 
LiveCode access RS-232 serial (real or emulated over USB) already?

The reason I'm excited about this kind of thing?  Friday my daughter 
came home from school for the summer with a set of DVD's with the 
software she had been using at school.  For each of these DVD's, her 
school must have paid some amount of money.  (Let's say £20 for the sake 
of it).

That presumes lots of things (we have a windows PC, it is powerful 
enough, there's space available on the machines, and the nous to be able 
to install it), not to mention suggesting tech support from school.

If any of those assumptions is wrong, it's money lost.

Purely as a hypothetical, let's say that there's an educational version 
of LiveCode running on the RPI, that supports a limited number of 
stacks/restricted functionality (no standalones?), etc, installed on 
RPI's at school that the kids are familiar with using already. (Of 
course, the stacks created with the ed version would have to be 
compatible with and expandable if they bought the full LiveCode IDE).

There were 30 kids in my daughter's year.  So, instead of £600, all the 
kids in that year could conceivably bring home the whole computer and 
the software stack for, say, £1500.  That would mean:
1) the school *knows* the software will work on the RPI, as it has been 
all year.
2) the kids are familiar with it, and can show off all their work to 
their parents.
3) It would seed LiveCode out there so that there /would/ be people who 
had seen or used it before.
4) runrev would see, I don't know...£300 or so (up to 10x that for a big 
school). Now multiply that by hundreds of schools?
5) benefits of scale allow the price of LiveCode to come down.

So, not hugely profitable, but gets that foot in the door. Seems if you 
can get a leg into the LEA for these schools, it'd be a no-brainer, and 
would be self-funding.

Heck, I'd kick into a kickstarter project just to see it demoed.

My kids' school is talking about getting iPads for all the kids. Now 
*that* I find distressing, as it is simply indoctrinating them into the 
"Apple *is* God, just shut-up-and-consume, don't program" mentality.

I already have to tell them 'no' when we walk by a sweets display at the 
grocer's.  Now I'm going to have to convince the little darlings that 
no, I cannot give them "just another" £1.99 for Angry Birds Space.

If they had their own RPI's, I could turn to them and say, with a 
straight face, "Why don't you *make* it yourself?"

Now, you get kids programming on the RPI, with the GPIO ports out for 
all to see, and I'd expect that a large percentage will want to play 
with that connector bit as well, coming into the Maker gestalt through 
the back door.

Though I personally, understand the draw of LiveCode being at a 
MakerFaire, I just don't see the business case for it.  Someone who paid 
£25 for a computer isn't going to spend hundreds on a full-blown 
IDE...and I can't see a way to sell to all RPI owners.  There's just no 
margin left on the darned things.

Again, I'm not Kevin, but I can't see the MakerFaire crowd paying his 
employee's salaries.

-Ken

On 09/07/2012 14:41, Thomas McGrath III wrote:
> There is communicating with PI and then there is running on PI. I am
> almost definitely sure that we can already easily communicate with PI
> but as for running on the PI ??????
>
> I still think Livecode needs to show up at a Maker Faire in a big way
> working with Arduino, Leonardo, Raspberry PI, and Phidgets to then be
> embraced by that community first. That is happening now in a very
> small way. Livecode is such a natural match for these devices and the
> people who use/buy them. I think getting that kind of leverage will
> go a long way towards getting accepted in academic circles.