Last summer a team of developers designed a media center called the Slice. It’s basically a low-power living room PC which you can use to play videos, listen to music, stream internet media, and more.
Now the first Slice units are ready to ship to backers of the of last year’s Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The team had hoped to ship early bird units starting in December, but a 4-month delay isn’t all that uncommon in a Kickstarter campaign. It’s nice to see that the units are shipping at all.
The Slice is designed around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and the folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation say it may be the first Kickstarter-funded project built around that module to begin shipping to backers.
Parts for the first 1,500 units are ready to go and there are also enough supplies to put together another 1,500 if there’s demand for more of the media centers.
Priced at £109 (about $161) and up, the Slice is a small box with a BCM2835 ARM11 processor, 512MB of RAM, threeUSB 2.0 ports, HDMI output with 5.1 channel audio, a 3.5mm audio jack, a micro USB port, IR sensor, and 10/100 Ethernet jack.
There’s room for a 2.5 inch hard drive and some of the more expensive models come with up to 1TB of storage, while all units have 4GB of eMMC flash storage.
The Slice uses XBMC/Kodi media center software to handle media navigation and playback duties and the device comes with a wireless remote control that lets you use the Slice while sitting on a couch.
The price is not only too expensive but truly laughable, considering the hardware specifications (especially with only 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, ancient Rasberry Pi BCM2835 SoC and has no WiFi at all). Even the recently reviewed MeLE PCG03 is better and cheaper as well…
Scratched my head and wondered why it exists; became more interested in a piece of string I found in my shirt pocket; walked away and forgot about this box; saved $160.
What’s the justification for the price again?
To quote Guardians of the Galaxy: “turd blossom.” These Pi lunatics just get weirder and weirder, not to mention that Microsoft has co-opted the Pi anyway in a defensive ploy. Why do you think Pi 2 exists?
Wow I’m essentially paying $161 for a 2.5″ hard drive enclosure that has a outdated Raspberry Pi fitted inside of it. Oh and a remote.
Just mount the Rasp Pi in any case of your choosing, and you have all the hard drive bays your heart desires. You can even have a 3.5″ drive.
Just pick a case, and JB-Weld (or drill holes and thread in) some motherboard risers in the pattern that the Rasp Pi uses, and you have a Raspberry Pi case with hard drive mounts.
Yeah, this doesn’t seem like a good idea at all. Nice looking case though.
Form over function. Sounds like an Apple product.
Looks like they got HDMI DTS audio pass thru working, otherwise it is the most expensive Pi case to date.
After the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, this is obsolete right out of the gates.
Hopefully they update the design with a Raspberry Pi 2 without a lot of trouble.
yay! 512MB RAM!
Harddrive/Network, both over USB
for just slightly more than 120€
sounds like a great idea.
wait, no. in fact it doesn’t.
The price and the whole campaign is a joke. My guess is they are hoping to find suckers to fall for this overpriced hardware…