It may not be the prettiest, but the world's smallest, cheapest personal computer is inspiring a wave of delightful DIY innovation among tech hobbyists across the planet.
With a price tag of just $25, the unassuming Raspberry Pi is an easily-programmable, open-source single board computer, about the size of a credit card, whose cost, size and low power requirements make it ideally suited for backyard inventors.
One possible scenario for wanting a cheap server that you can leave somewhere is if you have recently moved away from home and would like to be able to easily access all of the devices on the network at home, in a secure manner. This will enable you to send files directly to computers, diagnose problems and other useful things. You’ll also be leaving a powered USB hub connected to the Pi, so that you can tell someone to plug in their flash drive, hard drive etc and put files on it for them. This way, they can simply come and collect it later whenever the transfer has finished.
When the Raspberry Pi project was unveiled more than a year ago, two models were promised: one costing $25 and a more powerful one for $35. Ultimately, only the $35 device went on sale, to extreme popularity, with possibly a million sold.
But for those of you who felt $35 was just too expensive for a computer, that $25 "Model A" is finally available. It's now on sale in Europe, and the company will "lift this restriction very soon so the rest of the world can order too," Raspberry Pi spokeswoman Liz Upton wrote today.
Originally, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had plans to launch its $25 version of its Linux-based PC first, but ended up releasing its slightly more expensive $35 Model B version first. That turned out to be a good move as the Model B is estimated to have sold over one million units since it launched in April 2012.
[DarkTherapy] wrote in to tell us about his garage door opener that works with Siri and a Raspberry Pi. It’s pretty hard to find a picture that tells the story of the hack, but here you can see the PCB inside the housing of the garage door opener. He patched the grey wires into the terminal block. On the other end they connect to a relay which makes the connection.
Team 'Spooks' have been crowned winners of a 24-hour hacking event focused solely on programming on the Raspberry Pi computer in Leeds, where 12 successful hacks were demonstrated.
The team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming, making it ideal for educational use within schools.
