The first Rascals are up for sale

| Brandon Stafford

Today, I am delighted and terrified to announce that the Rascal is available for sale.

The Rascal beta testers have done their job. As of today, there are 11 Rascals available for sale in the Rascal store. The hardware is the same as the Rascals in the beta test, but the operating system and web interface have been upgraded with all the improvements from the last 6 months of testing and software development.

You're a good candidate to buy a Rascal today if:

  1. You want to connect something to the internet, and you'd like my help in doing it. I don't want these things stuck in a drawer!
  2. You're willing to put up with some rough edges. The web interface works, but it's still rudimentary.
  3. You have some technical skills. While not necessary, some vague familiarity with SSH would be helpful if we need to debug stuff.

Historic firsts

As far as I know, the sale of the Rascal to the general public marks new progress for our species in a few ways.

  • First small hacker board to ship with a modern Python web stack (Flask, uWSGI, and Nginx) pre-installed. This is the original target of the Rascal achieved.
  • First small hacker board to ship with a web-based editor that you can use to edit web pages on the board.
  • First Linux hacker board to ship with Arduino shield headers. (The Leaflabs Maple has the headers, but no operating system. I hear there was a beta version of the Chumby Hackerboard that had Arduino headers, but they were removed in the production release.)

"Getting started" video tutorial

Now that the hardware and software have reached a level of basic functionality, I've been working on video tutorials that explain how to use the Rascal. The first tutorial covers the web interface.

Detonate the fireworks now,

Brandon