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Hmmm.. Raspberry Pi

There's nothing like a bit of technology to get a geek's mouth watering.

Unfortunately, much of today's modern technology is very much "shrink-wrapped" -- hidden behind shiny plastic cases, super-tough glass screens and seemingly impervious proprietary screw-heads.

Of course a real hacker will see such things as minor distractions as (s)he dives deep under the covers to find out exactly what's inside and how it all works -- before modding it for their own purposes.

However, there's a new bit of kit about to be launched that will offer hardcore hackers and even curious onlookers the chance to get their hands dirty for a very low cost and with some potentially astounding results.

I'm talking about the ARM-based Raspberry Pi micro -- a complete ARM-based Linux board with a price of just $25.

Woohoo... let the fun begin!

Of course for that money, you're not going to get the shiny plastic case, the ultra-tough LCD display with touch-screen, or even a mains plug to stick in the wall.

In fact, all you're going to get is a little circuit board, loaded with some electronic components and a bit of software -- but that's not important. What is important is the potential this little board has.

Right now there is a whole community of geeks who have cut their teeth on things like the Arduino microcontroller boards. These are also little circuit boards that represent "the guts" of a computer but although they can be used to build amazing systems, they are just toys when compared to the Raspberry Pi and it's "industrial strength" ARM processor and they don't run Linux.

So let's get this straight -- if you're not a computer coding God and a hardware guru, you probably won't find it worth spending $25 on one of these little bits of concentrated computing power -- but don't despair...

Within a few short weeks of the product's release, the hacker/geek community will have almost certainly used these boards as the basis of an incredible array of very clever devices and you will find many of them very interesting.

No doubt the market will soon be flooded with open-source systems based on the Raspberry Pi hardware and we'll all be going "ooh" and "ahh" at the results.

I'd be very interested to hear what readers think about the potential for this cool little bit of hardware and its inbuilt firmware...

What applications can you see for the Raspberry Pi?

Are you planning to embark on some development using it as a platform?

What would you most like to see people building with it -- especially given the fact that it has enough power to manipulate video in real-time.

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