[racket] Revisiting Racket on ARM

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Tue Nov 15 17:46:49 EST 2011

I wonder whether anyone will do a Raspberry Pi assembly that includes an 
802.11g/n daughterboard, and house it in a wallwart with a little 
(non-house-burning-down) PSU at $50 price point for the whole thing.

What I describe is rediscovering the Linux plug computer, which I wish 
had been a been less expensive and more popular.  I think WiFi is a big 
win for many casual applications, because then you can just plug it into 
the wall anywhere in your house and have a networked device.

Until something better for homebrew networked appliances takes off, I'm 
liking the idea of the MIPS-based home WiFi routers that can take open 
source firmware.  Everyone is buying them, so economies of scale work 
for you, and they already have multiple NICs for router applications (no 
video, though).

BTW, 256MB RAM isn't too shabby for many purposes.  My earliest Racket 
libraries were developed on a 48MB RAM laptop that was running Racket 
(nee MzScheme), Linux, X, Emacs, text-based Web browser, etc., almost 
never swapping to disk.  Today, you'll need somewhat more than 48MB for 
modern Linux and Racket, especially if you don't want to ever be doing 
swap to flash memory.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/


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