Raspberry Pi £15 Computer

[+Gemintronic]

I went for ModMyPi for the case. They told me at least a few weeks.

https://www.modmypi.com/

 

My first use would be to test off the mains computing. I have a USB battery pack that can hold enough juice for a composite projector and the Pi.

 

The second use would be to get my Mother off of cable TV. Give her a Pi with XBMC on it. Right now the XBMC seems a little unstable though.

 

My last reason was to try RiscOS when they finally have a stable SD card image available.

[potatohead]

Avoid those cold irons. They are terrible.

 

You can get pretty good with a simple pencil style iron. Under $10. If you continue, get a temp controlled solder station. They rock, because you can keep the heat down, which is important for old electronics as well as small stuff we see today.

 

Buy a fun kit or two and build it. Won't take much to get going.

[+Gemintronic]

I guess the basic Radio Shack solder kit it is! After I get tired of the Arduino + LCD shield my next idea was to solder together a Wii Nunchuck adapter and TV out. Can't beat the price for a new video game console!

[akator]

It looks like rudimentary MAME, MESS, and a few other things have been accomplished on the Raspberry Pi over the last few months. Things are looking more hopeful that the RPi might eventually be a decent tool for powering a custom mini "classic console" emulation box, especially the 80s consoles and home computers. Unfortunately, the board is a little too big to fit into a 2600 cart shell... but wouldn't that be cool

[+Gemintronic]

Got the ModMyPi case a few days ago. This is posted from my Raspberry Pi using Midori. Video is NOT accelerated which means everything is laggy. You can configure the thing to boot to X but the graphical utils are far short of what I'd expect. They don't even seem to have a graphical package manager up and in here. I don't enjoy the weird mini USB plug either. Just because an iPad has one doesn't mean it's a great standard. Installing synaptics while browsing is nearly impossible. CPU time is through the roof. I did like the initial config menu that let you expand the partition size right away.

 

Just first impressions, folks. I'm sure more accelerated builds will be, er, better.

Edited August 15, 2012 by theloon

[gorf68]

I've mostly used mine with XBMC lately and it works ok, if a little sluggish on the menues.

I'll have to try some programming at some point.

[+Gemintronic]

Hopefully the RiscOS port gets further along. Always wanted to have one of those machines =)

[RevEng]

I got mine a few weeks before they uplifted all models to 512M

 

I'm running Raspbian on it to get a speed boost from the hard floating point support, as well as using the officially-blessed 1GHz dynamic overclock mode... both make a big difference over stock, but you still wouldn't want to use it as your web-surfing platform of choice. Things might get a wee bit better still if/when a GPU accelerated X server shows up.

 

In truth I bought it just to toy around and first, and eventually to run as a light-duty headless server, so I'm not disappointed at the performance.

[+Gemintronic]

I'm still wondering about battery life if you hook it up to a USB charger. I dunno if it would have too much draw with a keyboard attached.

[RevEng]

Do you mean a USB battery pack? The life depends on the mAh (milliamp/hour) rating of the batteries. Pi needs ~700mA when its not doing a lot. A pack that provides 1000mAh would last 1.4 hours. (with the Pi not doing a lot)

 

With a keyboard and some low-current usb accessories, you'll probably still be around 1A.