The raspberry pi, for those living under a rock, is the $25 linux pc that was announced big almost a year ago. It has a 700Mhz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM and an OpenGL ES capable GPU. To enable hardware hacking it comes with lots of GPIO pins. All in all about the performance of a premium smart phone from three years ago. But at $25 !!! The primary focus are school children, and the foundation wants to bring the fun on computing back to the children. Like every geek who read about it, I couldn’t wait to get one. First, the launch was scheduled for September or October, then postponed to February. The foundation decided they would outsource the shipping to some big electronics companies. They told them that a lot of people would try to get one of the first 10’000 boards, but still they weren’t prepared at all. The websites of the pi foundation as well as farnell and rs components were down the entire day. I got up earlier that day, hoping to be amongst the lucky ones. Later I signed up for a pre order somewhere in the queue for an upcoming batch. As with the first batch, each person could still order only one board. Then about a month ago, I received a mail indicating that it was time to place the order. And today I finally received it. (more…)