I'm so glad that affordable, low-power, hackable computers that run full operating systems are finally available. I don't think it's appreciated enough in the maker community what kind of impact this will have.
I'm a software engineer dabbling in electrical engineering. A while ago an EE friend of mine showed me how to use a transistor to power a motor using a GPIO pin on my Raspberry Pi. I was so stoked when it finally worked! I could turn wheels by typing "echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value" into my ssh session.
Within 10 minutes I was able to churn out a web interface that has two buttons, forward and backward, that you can access from a mobile device to drive around your raspberry pi. I had already hooked up a battery pack and webcam before. Suddenly, within minutes of "making the wheels turn from software", we had a remote controlled robot with a camera! All this is possible on an Arduino (I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in), but it'll be much more work. For the Raspberry Pi, I simply popped in an SD card with Debian and installed all my favorite tools.
By all means, I love writing low level C code and fiddling with basic microprocessors. I once hacked a DVR frontpanel into an alarm clock that makes you do arithmetic to stop the alarm. It was super fun. The chip didn't have any memory management and if you weren't careful your stack or heap would overwrite the program in memory. Between that, displaying custom bitmap fonts, correctly addressing the LCD display etc it took about a week to finish the project. On a Raspberry Pi you could do this in one afternoon using any language/tools you like.
> I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in
Some time ago there was someone who decided to hook a RAM chip up to an 8-bit micro-controller---like one of the ones in the various Arduino models---so that they could run Ubuntu on it. Their write-up (http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linu...) is actually quite interesting, though watching it boot is less so ;)
I'm a software engineer dabbling in electrical engineering. A while ago an EE friend of mine showed me how to use a transistor to power a motor using a GPIO pin on my Raspberry Pi. I was so stoked when it finally worked! I could turn wheels by typing "echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value" into my ssh session.
Within 10 minutes I was able to churn out a web interface that has two buttons, forward and backward, that you can access from a mobile device to drive around your raspberry pi. I had already hooked up a battery pack and webcam before. Suddenly, within minutes of "making the wheels turn from software", we had a remote controlled robot with a camera! All this is possible on an Arduino (I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in), but it'll be much more work. For the Raspberry Pi, I simply popped in an SD card with Debian and installed all my favorite tools.
By all means, I love writing low level C code and fiddling with basic microprocessors. I once hacked a DVR frontpanel into an alarm clock that makes you do arithmetic to stop the alarm. It was super fun. The chip didn't have any memory management and if you weren't careful your stack or heap would overwrite the program in memory. Between that, displaying custom bitmap fonts, correctly addressing the LCD display etc it took about a week to finish the project. On a Raspberry Pi you could do this in one afternoon using any language/tools you like.