What's Your Pi Plan??

Get one :-)

Get it running. It could serve as a general purpose email/web surfing system.

Learn Linux. I'm basically Windows based and haven't had the spare hardware to dedicate as a Linux box. With I've no choice.

Who knows, maybe a home backup/server, that's about when there will be a need for a second one.

Chris

The bluetooth would eventually talk to other devices I'm building such as a CAN enable MCU that talks to the car, maybe some distance sensors, or maybe a bluetooth powered remote ignition. Im also considering a GPRS solution for remote access but that is still being planned

I'm making a Pisatellite with mine, first though I'll have to make a PiRocket to get it up there.

You will need this to work with your planned PiGPS units.

Although eventually it may well become a PiShelfspaceUnit

Starting out as an XBMC media player thingy I think I'll dig out some of the interface boards I have in the cellar

and control the world or perhaps just a few LED's.

If I was allowed to put an LED message board in the back of the car to tell people to check their back lights, get off my backside

or pull over and take the bus then that may be a good project for it.

Some great input here.

I liked the GPS board development, Herson will you be making this GPS project open source?

My background is mechanical engineer in automation who migrated into PC's via the CNC/CAD/CAM route and have been deploying large IT systems for over 15 years. Last year I gave up my job to start a new school here in Ireland as I want to contribute to the overall success of society by investing in creative talent.

I intend running courses on computer programming (or whatever else I can do with these) and opening them to our own students and also to network with homeschooled students and other similar schools through the country and make the sessions available over the web using ustream TV or similar.

I had also considered deploying a ThinStation build on the RPi as they would seem to suit being used as a low cost thin client device.

My intention was to run an entirely open source (ulteo or similar) cloud compute environment with edubuntu at the back end and leverage off my IT knowledge to kick start interest in engineering & computing in general in our young people.

That's also why I was hoping something like Herson's GPS project would be open sourced so we could try our hand at some electronic innovation too.

Keep the ideas coming as it's great imagination fuel.

I plan to first get one of these devices, buy a Raw Steel SD Card and download an OS on it, design and build a rugged case that you can still use to access the ports, and then stick it in my pocket and poof a portable pc that I can take on the go. Get a wireless mouse and one of the small portable pocket-sized keyboards you can get on thinkgeek. May even get a wireless adapter that I can plug into it to use. Then when ever I run into a tv/monitor I can plug in and there I go.

yeah, it will soon enough. Im currently developing the firmware for the built in microcontroller. The good thing is, it can actually function by itself without the RPi. I still have to create another PCB for CAN operation that interfaces directly to a car system.

ed, your answer to Jesper and myself seems to imply that you equate clusters with High Performance Computing.  Well some clusters are used for HPC, certainly, but that's not all a cluster can do.  A cluster is a general purpose computing architecture that can run any program that doesn't require shared state between processors, since the nodes of a normal cluster share no memory.

There are countless non-HPC applications that can run on clusters.  For a start, any application that runs on a single machine but wants a backup node in case of failure, or which wants multiple replicas for load sharing, can be run on a cluster.  In these cases there is still a 1:1:1 mapping between a user, an application and a processor, so there is no concurrency in the actual application.  Clusters work fine in such a role, and are simple to configure.

More ambitious non-HPC cluster applications are those which can harness the parallelism available in a cluster to speed up the application (as in HPC), or to give the application high availability through redundancy, or most recently, to run applications in fully concurrent but non-SMP languages.

The latter are becoming quite popular nowadays.  Erlang has been in use for decades for writing applications that demand extremely high availability, and the same Erlang program will run happily on single core, multicore, or on clusters, making use of as many cores as are available.  Many other concurrent languages have joined Erlang recently as a result of the "multicore revolution", including Scala, Clojure, Haskell, F#, Go, and lots of others, and most of them run as happily on clusters as on SMP multicore systems.

There's a lot of fun to be had with clusters outside of HPC, and Raspberry Pi is certainly a viable candidate for it.

I want the Pi to drive an interactive video installation under Java with processing. (do you have more info on java implementation?)

I am also to bug around and try some cool casings, touch screen systems, mobile media stuff, make a file server for mobile use.

Thanks a lot by the way!

2 plans, depenidng on how things go after I get the Pi.

1) put a Pi into space as a flight controller for a high altitude balloon project. I have done this before with an Arduino but the Pi will make a much better platform. It will be integrated with amateur radio APRS, GPS logging and a barometric pressure sensor. I want to then teach this to teachers so they can replicate this in their classrooms for under $400.

2) Integrated house control system. My android phone will make HTTP calls to various services running on the Pi with various statuses, when it is within location of my home access point.

A mobile augmented reality device. I only wish the viewing device (AR Glasses) were this inexpensive, perhaps something Raspberry Pi might consider.