On Mon, Apr 07, 2014 at 10:04:34PM -0400, Christopher Havel wrote:
...is it just me, or is the idea of a $35 (ish) computer that requires a $100+ monitor (or some *really* clever jiggering and something that can receive blurry ugly composite video) in order simply to have a display...
Errrm, who said that a computer needs a monitor/keyboard/mouse ? There are plenty of uses where it just talks to non-human interacting devices, eg: broadband router, process control (central heating, weather station, ...)
well, doesn't that seem a little stupid? Above all else, the Pi is (theoretically) supposed to be a hacker/maker-friendly, hobbyist-friendly, super-low-cost computer. There really aren't many display interfaces in the world that are *less* hacker/maker- and hobbyist-friendly than HDMI. Besides, all my displays are VGA only -- and I'm not in a hurry to change that. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know? As far as I'm concerned, HDMI can go play a nice long game of Hide And Go **** Yourself.
tl;dr I'm buying a RasPi if it doesn't have a VGA port or some otherwise native support for VGA.
I bought this HDMI -> VGA converter for my R-Pi, it cost #8.05 when I got it in Jan (they seem to have back to back special offers):
http://www.cellphoneshop.net/hdmivga.html
This looks neater:
http://www.dhgate.com/store/product/hdmi-male-to-vga-converter-hdmi-to-vga-c...