Alex Zaharov-Reutt Thursday, 17 May 2012 19:00

Your IT – Home IT

The Raspberry Pi computer board is the worlds most inexpensive yet incredibly useful, useable, configurable, programmable and extendable credit card sized, ARM powered PC, ready for students, engineers and anyone to unleash new levels of creativity and imagination!

In addition, it offers end users, students, engineers and anyone the ability to write software and make new hardware creations powered by the Raspberry Pi more easily than ever before, thanks to the easily expandability of the Pi hardware.

This means that if you want to add a touch-screen interface to the Pi, you can do it. If you want to use the Pi board as the brains of some kind of robot youre creating, you can do it.

Meanwhile, the Pi is perfect for students and classrooms, re-introducing the programming skills that children in the early 80s were learning in classrooms full of Apple II computers, skills that dont appear to be being taught in primary schools any more.

Indeed, the Raspberry Pi is so full of possibility, I imagine that it may well set off a Woz-like era of creativity once more, getting students, engineers and anyone in front of highly configurable and customisable technology that lets you do anything you want, just as Woz did in the late 70s when he was soldering together the first Apple I computer.

Sure, todays kids wont be soldering together the Pi computer board it comes already full made for the price but instead of kids just using apps that someone else has made, students can easily create their own apps running on their own hardware designs, unleashing new creativity with this being the true promise of the Raspberry Pi era.

Now that the Raspberry Pi has launched in Australia (and around the world), the biggest problem will be getting your hands on one.

Only 10,000 have been made so far, but there are already 300,000 pre-orders, with the floodgates now officially open for anyone to register their interest in buying one as soon as their spot opens up to make a binding, paid-for order.

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