[Discuss] Raspberry Pi

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Matthew Kowalski wrote:
> Has anyone started playing with raspberrypi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/)
> yet?

We've talked about it a bunch of times on the hardware hacking list:
http://blu.wikispaces.com/Hardware+Hacking

Such as:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking at blu.org/msg00401.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking at blu.org/msg00377.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking at blu.org/msg00365.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking at blu.org/msg00192.html


No one other than Federico, who showed one at the last BLU meeting, has
mentioned having one.

I've been waiting for US distributors (like Newark; see first link
above) to carry them. (They have it listed on their site, but the
indicated lead time is months.)


> Is it worth picking up?

All depends on what you plan to do with it. Lots of talk of it being
used as a media playback device, and it being able to run XBMC, but I
think anyone using it as a home theater PC is going to be disappointed
by the performance (based on reviews I've read; see 3rd link above).

It's not ideal for embedded applications where you want lots of I/O,
unless you are prepared to build your own peripheral board. (There is an
"all-in-one" peripheral board soon to be available, but I suspect it
will cost as much as the Pi, and likely several times more. For now, at
least, it doesn't have an ecosystem of available peripherals like the
Arduino has.)

But it probably offers the most bang for your buck in a small computer
capable of running Linux, if your project needs that.

I'm thinking it would excel at being a kiosk or signage controller.
Situations where you want to take a cheap LCD TV and display stuff on
it, like an oversized digital picture frame, a virtual window showing a
remote web cam image, or live charts and graphs showing your network
operation or business metrics.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/