Low cost computers

Today many tablets are available in the market at rock bottom price. Aakash tablet first raised the noise at sub 2500 price tag. Later many companies are providing it with slightly higher prices but with better speed. A circuit board with several input ports for keyboards and mouse, output port for monitor and a CPU to support an operating system necessarily make a computer. Two such computers with minimal features usually may be used by would be computer hardware engineers: (i) Arduino and (ii) Raspberry Pi.

Adruino Board

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. In pharmaceutical engineering laboratory we can design drying experiments and heat exchange experiments with temperature sensors fitted to Arduino board. Temperature sensors will be attached to the board and the board will be attached with a computer with USB connector. The board can be controlled by an easy software Arduino software that is free of cost. We can control a motor or LEDs with the help of this board. In India Robokits is supplying Roboduino ATMega168 (Based on Arduino Diecimila) board costing only Rs. 850/-.

Price: Rs. 850.

Raspberry Pi Box

Raspberry Pi Board

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming. Booting takes place from a SD card and then data can be stored from a USB Hard Drive. It can be run with Linux Fedora core.

Price: Rs. 2600-2700.