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Raspberry Pi Hits the 2 Million Mark

Posted by timothy on from the chicken-in-every-pot dept.

The Raspberry Pi project that we've been fans of for quite a while now has hit a new milestone: Today, they announced that as of the last week in October, the project has sold more than two million boards. Raspberry Pi is anything but alone in the tiny, hackable computer world (all kinds of other options, from Arduino to the x86-based Minnowboard, are out there, and all have their selling points), but the low price, open-source emphasis, and focus on education have all helped the Pi catch on. If yours is one of these 2 million, what are you using it for? (And if you favor some other small system for your own experiments, what factors matter?)

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sorry, still not getting one. by kthreadd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Then you may want to take a look at BeagleBone Black. Costs $10 more but uses a much more modern and powerful chip.

  2. Mine Scares Cats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wanted to build a fun little project over the summer to scare cats out of the garden.

    The RPi was a great platform to work with for a casual project like this. Having the GPIO was a real winner here.

    I wrote it all up for others to peruse and have offered enough information that anyone could build it for themselves.

    http://norris.org.au/cattack/

    There are *quirks* to this hardware, but it is not a commercial device, it is for education use. I was telling my teacher-in-training friend that I don't know if I'd want to use the RPi in class with 30 students all finding the quirks at different times: it would be chaos! But for a single enthusiastic student working through these problems will give them a fantastic introduction to troubleshooting and the real life pain that comes with getting something to work.

  3. My PI serves random numbers on my lan. by anwyn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Some computers much more expensive than the PI do not have a Hardware RNG built in. Both my intel desktop and my laptop don't have a hardware RNG. If you try to generate a key, these computers will stop while gathering entropy. But not any more. I use my pi to dump random numbers into the entropy pools for all my computers that don't have an RNG.

    There are other hardware RNGs available, but none as inexpensive as a PI. Also because the PI has an RJ45 connection, it can be plugged into my router where it can serve random numbers for all computers on my lan.