What's Your Pi Plan??

I have 2 plans:

1) use it as a MAME emulator, I think kids will love retro games too!

2) use it as a signal processor to detect radio signals (HAM radio)

I was thinking of getting back into retro-programming (I was the proud owner of a ZX81) & saw the PI. It's great to see affordable & pioneering hardware back on the market. My PI's ordered no for the loooooong wait!

I want to set one up and see if it can be used in our school for teaching programing and maybe replacement computers for financially strapped classrooms.

I'll be using Pi for smart home control, as well as monitoring and automation of horticulture.

Richard Jarrett wrote:

 

Hi!

 

Just curious about what people were planning on using their Raspberry Pi's for once they started getting them!??

 

Although I could only order one Pi at the moment, I've got plans to get a few more soon. This is what I plan to use them for:

1) I want to build a small "game station" for my kids. A device that boots up and displays a menu of open source games that they can then play on the TV. I've written a few games myself that I know will be able to run on a device like this and I've collected a bunch more that I hope will run fine once I've got the device. I've also written a menu system for this and are currently looking for game controllers/joysticks/whatever that I can plug in and use (working out of the box would be nice, but if I have to write a driver first that's not neccessarily an obstacle - suggestions welcome).

2) I want to use one to replace my Fit-PC Slim (the first model), that currently serves as my web and mail server. While the Fit-PC is nice and small and draws little power, it still draws a lot more than a RaspPi. And since I only have 10Mbit downstream bandwith and 2Mbit upstream bandwith and ~300 visitors to my website a month and email is at most a couple hundred messages a day from LKML etc, a RaspPi should be able to do that job just fine and save me a bit of power.

3) One RaspPi will be used as a family media center (yeah, boooring, but it's cheap, it runs Linux, it draws little power and it can do the job, so why not).

4) I need one additional RaspPi just for general hacking/experimenting and since it's a ARM chip that is Bi-Endian it's going to be a cool little box to test my own software on for endianness issues - deffinately going to run it in big endian mode since my main development machine is little endian.. Hope to catch a few bugs by testing stuff on a Pi

5) I want to get one or two for my parents, set up with a basic Linux desktop that can just do web browsing, email and very basic word-processing/printing since that's all they use their PC's for... If I can switch them to RaspPi's for their very basic use they will save a lot of power, save a lot of space (for the huge PC's they currently own) and hopefully have an environment that I can actually be bothered to help them with.

6) I haven't thought of more uses yet (well, I have some ideas (mainly about controlling house temperature, lighting etc, building a robot with my son, that kind of thing...), but nothing solid yet) - but I probably will buy an extra Pi just for the hell of it since something is bound to show up as "a project" and they are so cheap that even if I can't find a use for the last one I can just use it as a gift or something and be pleased that I supported the foundation in a small way :-)  Their goals kick ass - we need more young people with hard-core tech skills - I'd buy 10 Raspberry Pi's just to support that!

I plan on running various Linux distros and have my 10 yr old learn it as we have a MS Windows box & Apple Mac box that he uses so he knows both OS'. I've been using Linux since 1998

My plan is to use RasPi for ... everything.

It's the first Linux device with Ethernet at a price that makes it viable to "buy a ton of them, use one per task".

Among the candidate applications:

- Home automation, networked controls and sensors on everything from lights to appliances (currently use X10).

- Home security, all PIRs, door and window triggers and the alarms networked and calling out to cellphone.

- Home entertainment, with the usual XBMC or MythTV in the living room and slave nodes around the house.

- High level access/monitoring of 3D printer (low-level realtime control is done by a dedicated microcontroller).

- Thin client workstations in all rooms, linked to the main home computer systems.

- Voice recognition and control, recognized commands routed to wherever is appropriate over the network.

- Servers for many different things, one RasPi per application:  for example a wiki for my cooking recipes.

- Experimental RasPi clusters.  I have a background in parallelism and concurrency, this is going to be fun.

- Music making, controlling my many dumb MIDI devices and giving them a level of musical intelligence.

- Open gaming system.  It's early days in this scene, but with millions of RasPi around, the day will come. :-)

And so on ...

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

...

 

Among the candidate applications:

 

...

- Experimental RasPi clusters.  I have a background in parallelism and concurrency, this is going to be fun.

...

Yes! A cluster of RPi's :-)

I want to do this as well - would be great for experimenting with parallelizable algorithms, distributed <whatever> systems... How often do you get the chance to test the stuff you write on a cluster of machines? Not often in my world - with the RPi I can easily set up 10 machines and start experimenting :-)

Cool stuff!

It should be possible to power the RPi from a solar cell - BUT you really need to regulate the voltage down to between 4.75 and 5.25 volts - plenty of LDO Regulators on element14 that would do that. Something with an output accuracy of 5% or better.  Ideally you want some form of power storage otherwise passing clouds could give you a brownout!

The 5V on the USB micro USB port goes straight into the processor - so 6V could be uncomfortable - we don't want you to toast it!  There is a resetable fuse and a 5V Transil but importantly there is no reverse voltage protection diode as such - so please take care when wiring up.

You can also feed power to the board through the GPIO connector (P1) - Pins 2 & 4 are wired to +5.

I'm thinking a model A may suit my needs, but I'm going B anyways.

My main plan is to set it up as an S/NES emulator on the back of my TV. Will try and draw board power from the service USB port on the TV, HDMI out, and only need a bluetooth dongle plugged into the board. Input will be a PS3 controller via bluetooth (hopefully I will figure out a way to get two working simultaneously!). Will be nice to play all my classic games from one source with virtually endless and immortal saves, and without using the now antique systems and carts.
It might warrant gutting the PS3 controllers to and putting them inside the shell of an SNES controller (sans analog sticks and shoulders) for maximum win!

Also, like much of everyone else, I want to set up XBMC and see if it will make a suitable replacement for my current Media PC. This all depends on if a few key pieces of software can be used in Linux or replaced, and if I can find a nice storage solution.