At the time of writing it seems that the Raspberry Pi site is down, probably suffering from a slashdot effect. I would imagine almost every nerd, sheevaplug developer, OLPC developer, DIY’ers who want to build their own home media centres are looking to get a Raspberry Pi right now.
So what would I use one of these mini-computers for? I can think up a range of cool applications for this device, assuming I can order a few of these to play with. I’ve got ideas such as:
- A Tahoe-LAFS storage node, I could attach a few HDD’s to one of these devices and run Tahoe-LAFS on it, these computers are cheap enough and have a low enough power consumption that I could just have them on all the time.
- A Babeld node, I could have a few of these devices dotted around my house/apartment to build a mesh network.
- A portable computer, not quite a tablet PC with a screen, but it has enough connectivity to wire it up to a modern monitor or a TV.
- A penetration testing device, just wire it up with a few DC batteries, plug in a wireless card, wrap it up in a water proof package. Power on, and see how far you can throw it at your target, I can see endless possibilities for this device for pen-testing.
I wonder if the device will ever be able to be powered via the USB port or the the ethernet port. I can see some interesting uses for this device in data centres for monitoring the network, power consumption and a host of other things.