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Pi Computing

·236 words·2 mins
tech edx intel-nuc iot raspberry-pi technology
James Pettigrove
Author
James Pettigrove
Cloud Engineer with a focus on Microsoft Azure

Really starting to dig the RaspberryPi at the moment. With the latest A+ model being very tiny and a power draw of half a watt at idle I have decided it would be better to get one of these versus a Intel NUC.

I initially want a NUC to run a 24/7 Virtual Machine server but when I weighed up that

  • My Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga can already do this well enough
  • A loaded up NUC would mean more power draw and a cost of AU$400+
  • You can nest VM servers on a single physical host these days
  • I wouldn’t be learning anything new (other than maybe clustering experience with ESX)

It hit me like a tonne of bricks that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to buy a Intel NUC.

The RaspberryPi on the other hand is the very cheap (starting around AU$25), is Linux powered and very much hackery/programming focused. Thus it would help develop skills I have been learning over the past year with edX cs50x and lfs101x courses as well as introduce me to Python, working with sensors and other hardware based programming thanks to the GPIO connector.

Plenty of very cool projects going on with the Pi, ranging from night camera’s and robot controllers to ISS communication nodes and space bound Superman ejectors.

Who else is currently hacking about with the Raspberry Pi? Share your thoughts, recommendations and projects with me.

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