A few things you can do with the Raspberry Pi
The potential uses for the Raspberry Pi are almost
limitless. We thought we would capture just a few of them.
1) A starter to the world of computer programming.
Scratch is an easy to use, interactive, collaborative
programming environment designed for the creation of interactive
stories, animations, games, music and art. This software package helps
budding young programmers learn programming concepts, design, important
mathematical and computational ideas, using a drag-and-drop building
blocks-style interface. There are also a bundle of Python demo games
provided with the Debian "Squeeze" distro.
The Foundation is working to get its education pack together
for the classroom, to help schools to teach programming to students.
The
education pack will also enable the Pi to be used as a
teaching platform for other subjects other than programming.
2) Use the Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive media centre. The two XMBC
distributions for Raspberry Pi (OpenELEC, Raspbmc) are in rapid
development. With the right software, the Raspberry Pi has sufficient
power to play full HD (1080p) h.264 encoded video.
3) Attach a large external hard disk to the USB ports and create your
own inexpensive and low-power NAS server. Share video, music and
documents around your network under the direction of the Raspberry Pi.
4) Given the incredibly low power requirements of the Raspberry Pi
and its silence (no fan noise), it has the potential to be a useful
personal web server. The hardware should be able to cope with low
traffic making use of PHP and MySQL.
5) Make your own secure file repository, joining the cloud computing
revolution.
6) Build your own Arcade cabinet to play your favourite arcade games.
Use one of the MAME builds to emulate several thousand classic
arcade video games on the Raspberry Pi.
7) Home-brew voicemail system using FreeSwitch, an open source
telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and
chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch.
8) Convert the device into a touchscreen tablet.
Next Page: Summary
Read ahead
1. Introduction
2. Distributions
3. Benchmarks
4. Software
5. Things
to Do with the Raspberry Pi
6. Summary
Last Updated Sunday, June 03 2012 @ 07:48 PM EDT
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