Well I've been banging on about this to everyone I know so thought it was time to put something on this blog too.

The Raspberry Pi is a UK charity aiming to produce a cheap computer to get children back into programming to address the shortfall in skills that has gradually been on the rise in the 16 - 18 bracket.

By producing a small and cheap ARM based linux computer in the $25 - $35 range they hope that they will be able to get younger children involved in how a computer works instead of just being a consumer.

Some of their arguments for this are that it will be so cheap that they a) won't be worth stealing b) won't be too much of an issue if they get broken and c) cheap enough so each child can have one, unlike a family PC. Especially where they may be limited from doing anything that might damage a family PC as the parents might not have the skills to fix it also.

The Raspberry Pi will be credit card sized, have a HDMI and Composite TV out, Analog audio out, and either 1xUSB or 2xUSB and a 10/100 Ethernet port depending on which model you go for.

Speaking of models this is what I gather there will be :-

You might not think that 700MHz is very fast with todays 6 and 8 core machines running with 3000MHz+ per core but for something that only consumes 1W of power and is the size of a credit card this is quite impressive. It will be quite capable of running Fedora and a few open source apps like OpenOffice IceWeasle (WebBrowser) and a whole host of other software.

It's Broadcom SoC also packs a good media punch with the BluRay quality video playback and enough GFLOPS to play Quake 3 @1080p with all the settings set to Max, now the demo does show the framerate running between 10 & 30 fps but that is with all the settings switched on and at a giant screen resolution. I couldn't play it with the PC I had at the time at that quality and it cost a lot more that $35.

As well as the targeting the educational market, they also hope to be able to sell to developing worlds. However the majority of interest is currently in the HomeBrew/Hacker/Maker community and it looks like the first 10,000 will be going that way. Personally I can't wait to get my hands on one (or two) and build low power Nas devices, home automation, DVR.

My Dream at the moment for the RPi would be to make a MythTv Bramble, currently I haven't investigated if MythTV backend will run under ARM or not.

To get an idea of how small this is, today RPi released the PCB design for the board (barring any issues with a small test run this will be the final design) and somone on their forum printed it out actual size and placed an Ethernet socket and dual USB sockets to give an idea of how tiny it will be.

This image is probably larger than life, quite literally.

I hope you found this interesting, and fancy getting a slice of the Pi, however could you wait until i've had mine first as I don't want them to run out before I get one.

What it won't do!

Run Windows (probably not even Windows 8 due to the ram)
Play MineCraft (bit of a guess but again not enough ram)
Play Crysis at max settings (do I need to bother)
Make you more attractive to the opposite sex