The Raspberry Pi changed the world. It’s small, affordable, and can be used in many different computing projects.
Today the Raspberry Pi is a phenomenon, the world’s third best-selling, general-purpose computer. If you’re interested in computers, chances are you’ve got one of the tiny British-made boards tucked away somewhere. It’s inside laptops, tablets, and robots; it has run experiments on board the International Space Station; it has spawned a massive ecosystem of kits for learning about computers; and it has even broken into mainstream media.
For a couple years now, a someday goal of mine is to build a Raspberry Pi supercluster. What will I use it for? No clue, but it sounds and looks cool.
Check It Out: Raspberry Pi: How This Cheap Computer Changed the World
These little devices work on so many levels – cheap computing for IoT – weather stations. Wonderful training platforms for kids to learn to code – start with Scratch which some kids over here are lucky enough to learn at school, finish with Python and C.
I have some MeArm robots – open source hardware that schools can make for themselves if they have a laser cutter – driven with a Pi it can teach mechanics, electronics, geometry, coding, spatial awareness and so on. Great fun too.
Brilliant platforms on which to learn a proper operating system – any Unix BTW, including BSD with eye candy, aka MacOS and iOS. The fundamentals are all similar.
Does my DHCP/DNS, code development platform, weather station, deskside clock, home automation, programmed christmas tree lights, you name it!
The Raspberry Pi is great. Also Pi clusters are great – I’ve used one for research, experiments, and demos for years, and it fits in a backpack. (I use a compact 8-port ethernet switch and power the cluster with an Anker 10-socket USB power supply.)
I want to run Haiku OS on one of these babies. Just waiting until the project gets an official version working.