Raspberry PI (aka RPi) .

i can't wait to experiment with one. Seems endless, the things which could be done. And i might finally be able to upcycle an old LCD screen from a long dead laptop i been holding onto. Make my own tablet PC .. complete with mouse and keypad support, and having none of the bullsquat software limitations, and hardware tweaking restrictions, that greedy bastards like MS and Apple impose. You buy it and it's yours to do with as you flipping please! Absolute awesome sauce the RPi is !!


*in order to give the old screen some touch-screen functionality, i've seen DIY plans for projectable pointing devices and keyboards+. Which i am certain can be tweaked to allow what i'd need. A beauty of the RPi is that we are Free to tweak as we will. :)

It is powerful enough to run MAME versions of every Cps 1 & 2 board, all the Neo-Geo games and pretty much every 80s and some early 90s games. Plus you can hook it up to an Arduino to controll all the buttons and switches required, and you can hook up your old 4:3 LCD to it.Everything fits in a little table-top cabinet.

Just saying.

Just found out about it, huh?:)

Are you in for a treat. FWIW there are some other great (similar) products, most cost a bit more (often doing a bit more too) if the Pi doesn't fit your needs.

One of my favorite uses: low power SSH relay at my home, so I can tunnel out HTTP and HTTPS traffic from behind a restrictive firewall and bounce it off my home connection.

My buddy has one as a super low cost media center for his trailer out on the coast (yes, it has just enough juice to play his compressed movies, obviously more than enough for his music).

People have done some fun stuff with them and assembled lists of known, working parts that you can run with them (e.g. USB devices which actually run).

The Pi now has twice as much RAM as at launch as well as some other upgrades. Enjoy.

That would rock! Also been thinking of what fun my nephews and i can have automating their old Star Wars toys.. like the big AT-AT Walker :) Or make a functional R2-D2. All sorts of things to do with this RPi.

This is like a return to the old Radio Shack days, when they sold electronic parts to hobbyists. Like Steve Wozniak and the Homebrew Computer Club ;-)

I just came a little.

Awesome! i've much to learn. And it is a trailer within forest for which i plan to live. Was looking at tablet PCs to provide all electronic entertainment. Seek to cut power consumption such that i can capture my own solar, as i experiment with bio-gas and wind. A tablet would work well enough for me. But dang they are restrictive. i want more freedom than what those companies 'allow'. i see i have options to just do my own thing, and that makes me very happy! And i imagine there must be active hobbyist sites i can learn what i need. What a thing, for them to sell freed-hardware!

I think you might be a bit late to the party. :)

How so?

They're old news at this point. A lot of us were following the project when they were still planning production.

While you're at it, check out the Pandora, those are shipping now, I have one sitting in it's original box on my bed in the US, ah, only 2 more months TM till I get to open it.

I've had one running xbmc in my deform tv for a while now, great liitle machine. Gonna get another one and build a mini mamecade.
Bedroom not deform, lol.

Those are pretty neat - I'd be interested to know just how powerful they are, if you find out with your one.

Have you got the 600mhz one or the 1GHz one?

I ended up upgrading to the 1ghz, I technically have it, but it's in the US, I have to decide whether to wait to go home or risk having it sent to me.

Right now, the more people who buy the new ones, the faster the older orders clear.