Hey, guys! Just bought a RPi from Amazon. Since they're always so low on stock, I went ahead and spent an extra $10 to get it. I considered looking at other ARM PCs as alternatives, but I figured that the RPi would be my best best for a first considering it's popularity, amount of documentation, and already finished projects with community. Later down the road, I'll probably delve into another companies product.
I spent a long time thinking about what I would do with it. What would my purpose for it be, ya know? With only 512MB of memory, you can only do so much. I can at least do some extra processing with another desktop and have the Pi retrieve it or something. I figured it out though.
I'm going to start out with putting it on my vlan that has a pool of routables and give it one while making it an ssh server for my network. I could then play with Apache, Wordpress/other CMS, and more. On top of that, I have a golden opportunity to get some very basic hands on hardware programming. When I come across more money I can get an Arduino to connect and play with. I also kind of want to assemble this GPIO adapter I saw that connects to two SNES controller ports; that would be fun for emulating arcade/classic games! Aside from all of that, I could just use it for learning stuff I generally have an interest in. I'm not really great with bash scripting, so I can learn and practice that on the go now. For networking, I can have another computer on any network I'm on be a hypervisor in GNS3 and process the topology while I work on it from the RPi. This would help me be able to move into another room and be more focused.
There are lots of things that can be done with this Pi, but I think it really just comes down to the convenience of having a computer that I can easily take with me somewhere. It doesn't have to be study, study, productivity all the time with it. There have been many times that my brother or my girlfriend and I wanted to watch a movie in another room but couldn't because of either certain inputs or just not viable. The Pi can do digital via HDMI(DVI would be easy with adapter) and analog via composite. This would make things much easier.
I'm just making this post to express the realizations I came to today and to hopefully keep me motivated and remember them.
If anyone was lost on what to do with theirs if they've had it for awhile and haven't thought about it lately or were just planning on getting one, then maybe this could spark an idea or two. And while I'm at it, to actually provide for some discussion, for those that have a Raspberry Pi, what do you use it for? If you don't have one, what would you do?
