November 2015
April 2013
Apparently the Raspberry Pi is a little easier to get hold of in England, but I down under count myself very lucky to have got one after many months of waiting.
You might have heard about the Raspberry Pi as they're made by an innovative UK organisation who's goal is to produce an affordable computer to encourage kids (and hopefully others) to explore hobbyist programming.
It's based on the same kind of technology that is in your mobile phone or tablet so it's a great way to introduce people to technology and methodology that could be very useful to youngsters in their future careers.
Their website is here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
What's this about? It doesn't have too much to do with cloth does it? However it does have everything to do with our goals to help protect our environment and run this site in a manner where we do as little damage as possible by using appropriate power saving methods. We can't run the site from one of these but we want to explore using the Raspberry Pi as a possible platform for some new backup servers. They use a tiny fraction of the power of our already very power optimised systems, will of course run Linux and seem perfect for a job that requires a computer to be on 24 hours a day 365 days a year doing little other than copying files. With our lovely climate I think it could even be hooked up to a simple solar set up to produce our first zero environmental running cost computer.
So here's a beginning to this project and a few photo's of our unboxing. For reference the Raspberry Pi is about the size of a credit card and costs as little as $25 US. Although we, as usual, had to spend considerably more than this to get one in Australia.
