One of those two million is sat under my desk, collecting dust. I know a few others that are, and, I wonder what percentage of that 2 million are in the same situation?<p>Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be. Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.<p>I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure, everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to getting started.<p>It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially expected.<p>What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.
I am running two Tor nodes on two raspberries:<p><a href="https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B679923178D2B63F22C98489E689E1F91B899624" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B679923178D2B63F22C984...</a><p><a href="https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/0A7028F6600F940D1A680AEBCD928509A17AE8FC" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/0A7028F6600F940D1A680A...</a><p>A single pi can push about 600 kb/s. This includes a lot of circuit requests and other encryption. Thinking of buying some more.
What's the plan for future devices? It would be great if some low cost device like this would have a 12-18 month upgrade cycle and create the sort of buzz as an Apple or Samsung device. Moore's law has benefits at $30 too. Maybe release a $99 version every year then make last year's model available at $35. Get Intel involved? They're really working hard to get into low-power devices.
I am using two of those two million RPis with camera modules to record pollinators visiting flowers (backpackable; activated by motion; solar powered). I'm still ironing out some kinks with the software, but the quality of footage produce by the camera module, the low power requirements and the flexibility you get with the RPi are really pretty amazing considering the price.
I got a Pi and a case and connected it via a USB-to-MIDI cable to my electronic piano, and now I can play and record performances to midi files on the Pi. Really cool. It basically gave my piano a technology update so I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars for one of those newer keyboards with a USB port.<p>My next mini-project is to build a web app that can run these midi tools and list the performances in a nice UI, so that I can control the piano with a tablet or phone on the wifi network (using something other than an SSH terminal).<p>I am thinking of getting a couple of other Pi's for webcam use. I had one hooked up to a cam but it kept dying for some reason. Maybe because of the cheap wifi dongle.<p>It's an amazing little gadget and the sky's the limit on what you can do with it.
I absolutely love how ubiquitous these things have become. They're genuinely useful for a lot of different purposes but, to me personally, I like how eco they are. I realize this sounds a bit eco-hipster, but I really mean it: Whereas people used to have big media center machines under their TVs, you can just pop a Pi underneath your TV, install RaspBMC, and that's all you need. It takes 3-4w, nothing more. Lovely.<p>Having said that, a 60" TV and surround sound receiver will probably also take a least a few watts, if I had to guesstimate :)
I have found mine very useful. It turned my old USB printer into a fancy-pants wifi printer. It has been running tiny-tiny rss since google reader shutdown. It runs an irc bouncer for me. It runs a dyndns updater for me much better than my buggy router.<p>It would also run an rss-full-article-fetcher process I wrote but it turns out to be impossible-mission to get ghc to compile or cross-compile anything for arm.<p>I've found it really useful for lots of low-power bandaid solutions to various problems I have had.
How reliable are they as always-on 'servers' wrt running off an sd card? Doesn't it wear out the card in a few months time if you consider all the writing to /var/log? Anyone had one running for close to the two year's it's been out now?
Too bad that miscellaneous issues prevent them from getting an Android port out -- regardless of RAM and CPU requirements, I've been trying to get a decent accelerated web view going on it since I first got one, and _nothing_ works well enough (Qt5 took forever to stabilise - and still isn't quite there yet, X11 still has no hardware acceleration, there are no browsers that take advantage of Wayland, Firefox OS is still not stable enough, and even the JavaFX preview ships without a web view).<p>But hey, they can play back video pretty OK, so I eventually settled on a mix of video and live streaming a desktop browser rendered on a normal PC:<p><a href="http://the.taoofmac.com/space/hw/RaspberryPi/Streaming" rel="nofollow">http://the.taoofmac.com/space/hw/RaspberryPi/Streaming</a><p>Thing is, omxplayer crashes out of the blue for no apparent reason (either halts the player process or locks up the RPi _completely_, on any hardware rev) and have an alarming tendency to corrupt SD cards, so I'm moving to the Beaglebone Black ASAP.<p>They do make very nice low-power servers (I have one doing AirPrint via CUPS for iOS devices), though, and of course I try out a bunch of things on mine - if it runs quickly enough on a Pi, then it's blisteringly fast on a "normal" machine.
Would I notice any performance gain from using a cheap pc over a pi for something like BT sync?<p>The Pi's processor is equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium 2, and that's kinds scary.
Although perhaps better suited for arduino, I have one sensing bathroom availability in my old office. <a href="http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-graf" rel="nofollow">http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-graf</a>