Raspberry Pi

[Thee]

a questions here....

i assume you added external USB drives to it? If so how do you handle power supply for the USB drives? I mean can the Pi handle 2 USB drives on it? as i know newer external USB hard drives don't have separate power supply. or am i wrong?

No, I don't use USB hard drive, I use a network drive.
But if you want a USB drive, there are those who got external power supply and they, as far as I know, work with Raspberry Pi without problems. Only the drives that get power from USB wont work because it's too much for the Pi.

For me a network drive is better, because I plan to get 1 more Raspberry Pi for the bedroom, so I can access my media over the network from both Raspberries.

[mastablasta]

network drive implies having a sever somewhere, right?

[CharlesA]

network drive implies having a sever somewhere, right?

Yes.

File server, NAS, whatever.

[Thee]

network drive implies having a sever somewhere, right?

Yes, you can build a NAS server yourself if you have an old computer and HDDs laying around, but if you want something more compact, efficient, without hassle and also quiet, like I'm using, then you need to buy these:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...rds=NAS+server

Those act as a (NAS) server for your files.

[montag dp]

What about buying a bunch of them and using them to run some large numerical simulations in parallel? Probably not actually the cheapest or most effective way to do that, but it would still be cool.

[layers]

No. you get it, then put it on the usb behind your tv, install xbmc with navi/fusion and watch every movie or tv series you know

[linuxcoffeelover]

I have one its a great low powered pc. I'll save some problems get the usb power supply at adafruit it's rated at 5.25 volts and 1amp it will keep the pi at a constant 5 volts. the one before the one I bought from adafruit couldn’t power pi.

[rtalcott]

Been pleased with my Pi as a command line server...and I have a cubie board coming which I think may be more capable.
http://cubieboard.org/

[lz1dsb]

Raspberry Pi looks pretty amazing... But this Cubieboard is nice too, but a bit more expensive. I liked the enclosures of Cubieboard.

[3rdalbum]

If you want to teach people how to hack computers, you can buy an old PC for £10 and hack that (and there's NO stock dry up). Raspberry Pi just seems like another created "solution", looking for an application... seems a bit pointless to me, and it doesn't even do USB *OR* PXE boot.

Meh, less than luke warm here.

This is what I find interesting about the Raspberry Pi:

1. Portability
2. Low-power use - can be run entirely from USB power
3. GPIO pins
4. Can use USB devices
5. Can be programmed in anything, including Python or Bash
6. Is not severely resource-constrained like the Arduino

What do you do with an ultra-portable computer that can be hooked up to any USB device, any basic input/output such as sensors or motors, and can be powered from one of those mobile phone backup batteries? Autonomous robots springs to my mind immediately. So do wearable computers. Others have had cooler ideas. Many more have had more mundane ideas such as "tiny noiseless home server" or "kids can learn programming with GPIO with a machine they can bring to school" but that's still cool.

If you just want a computer to write programs on, or use for web browsing and Facebook, you could pick up a second-hand machine for $35 the lot. Add $20 for a GPIO interface that plugs in via USB if you want to get into that.

Raspberry Pi, however, has a killer combination of features that makes it so much more flexible than your big, power-hungry dumpster PC.