KidsRuby on Raspberry Pi – another video demo
Our friends at The Hybrid Group managed, as it turns out, to beat us by a day in being the first people to demo an alpha board in the USA last week. KidsRuby is what it sounds like – a Ruby for kids – and it’s running beautifully on the Raspberry Pi. This is exactly the sort of application we want to see on the device, and we’re really pleased to see it up and running. It looks like there will be some optimisation for speed before we launch, but what’s there already is very useable.
Ron Evans from the Hybrid Group did a presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in California, where the Raspberry Pi was rolled out at the end (to a very encouraging ripple of applause). Unfortunately the video is too big for us to embed here – if you want to watch it, go to the conference website. The Raspberry Pi makes its appearance at 17:08, but the whole talk is well worth your time.
16 comments
Kia Kroas
The KidsRuby logo is linked to http://www.raspberrypi.org/2011/09/kidsruby-on-raspberry-pi-another-video-demo/www.kidsruby.com (which is a 404 page). Consider fixing that link?
Thanks!
liz
Thanks – and apologies! That’s WordPress’s very annoying WYSIWYG editor for you. ;)
Toenex
So any chance you are going to fix the link?
jamesh
Done.
Kristian
Cool running Ruby on the Raspberry PI, that means we could run systems like TRACKS on a Ruby instead of a huge webserver :) (www.getontracks.com) This opens up a huge “market” for the Raspberry PI :)
Andrew Minor
What excellent news! Thanks for posting.
Don
I’ve been following this project with excitement for a couple of months now but frankly this video doesn’t show RPI in a good light, yes I know it’s still a dev board but people still do get impressions. It was so slow to boot the guy actually thought it had crashed! and then we actually had to wait for Ruby to interpret ONE instruction. After seeing this I’m thinking the cost is irrelevant if it isn’t at least “fast enough”.
The quake demo was great, the HD video demo was too, I just don’t think that this presentation does you any favours.
jamesh
I think part of the problem was that the presentation wasn’t particularly slick – obviously not much practicing had gone on, probably because they had only just got the board. Also he wasn’t able to see the display to see when to log in which doesn’t help!
But, to be honest, it’s not the fastest computer on the planet – it’s a 700MHz Arm. Some things will run well, some won’t. As more software gets rebuilt to take advantage of the GPU I expect things to get a lot better, but still some work to do there.
What it can do well, is teach programming. It doesn’t need to be mind blowingly fast to do that.
Michael
I just want to re-iterate Liz’s point – the presentation is very entertaining and echos several topics that David and Eben have spoken about previously but with a slightly different perspective. I recommend :D
repulsive
raspberry pi, the best portable computer for our kids. lol. sorry guys, i had to express it. :)
w1
next comes the Potay-2 cam! ;)
Sublime
I see Digikey is supporting the project. Please tell me they will be available through other distributors who are capable of excepting PayPal. I plan on purchasing a few of them (hopefully on the buy one give one program) but refuse to hold a credit card so companies like Digikey are out of the question as they refuse to except anything but credit cards.
liz
Your information is wrong there – we are not working with Digikey (although we wouldn’t necessarily say no if they asked). You may have come to the conclusion that we’re working together from the fact that we pointed out that Digikey were giving out free passes to Maker Faire, where we were presenting: we are not the same organisation as Maker Faire and we’re not associated with Digikey. As for your other point, you’ll read elsewhere on this site that we do not expect everyone to have a credit card, and will be taking PayPal as well as offline forms of payment.
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Installing KidsRuby on RPi
Need help on installing KidsRuby on RPi. I’m tried compying the files to a SD card obtained from their site but it does not boot. I also tried seaching for help online but it’s not readily available. Please help. Thank you.