Ask HN: What would you do with a Raspberry Pi? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you do with a Raspberry Pi?

4 pointsflannell4 comments

The Raspberry Pi device is aimed at kids who need to look beneath the gaming layer and start learning to code. However, I'm interested in potential applications that a low-cost, low-powered SOC board could do.

So, playing to its strengths I thought of these two scenarios.

Turn any TV into a smart one - with a HDMI 1080P video outlet and using your telly remote (CEC) to control it, it seems an ideal candidate. Most TV's also have a USB port so it could be powered over that.

Remote displays. Now Apple have started to bundle Airplay mirroring, could be a cheap wireless display where cables cannot reach. Perhaps a cheap Nagios status dashboard for sysadmins.

I don't think it's powerful enough to drive an MS Kinect.

Does anyone else care to share ideas?

I managed to order a couple - my plan for them is to use them in a couple of data loggers I'm currently using Arduinos for, but would like to integrate video storage along with the logged data - I've also got a couple of these on the way too: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite... for the same reason.

Minimal case, plug pack, rollup waterproof keyboard, distro that boots straight to Lisp (CL, DrScheme, whatever) ... and you have a modern equivalent of a C64 for teaching kids to code.

Why would you need a C64 equivalent to teach anyone to code?

IMO, cost (not counting 3rd world countries) is not the inhibiting factor of why kids don't code. It's motivation. At no point in history has it been easier to learn to code than it is now.

The attraction of Pi isn't in attracting people to learn programming. Simply put, it's an affordable computer in a small form factor that runs Linux.

I'm old enough, and ugly enough, to remember the games built by teenagers of the 80's. Ultimate Play The Game (Rare) - Stamper Brothers in Ashby, Codemasters by the Darling brothers. I hope rpi takes off, it'll be interesting to see what innovation comes out of it.

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