The Raspberry Pi in its native habitat

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny credit card-sized computer that runs a variant of Linux. It's designed to be affordable yet powerful enough to run basic applications. The Raspberry Pi is especially popular for teaching programming in schools, and its low cost, small form factor, and low power consumption make it ideal for experimentation.

I'm still involved in one of my alma mater's secret societies*, and later this summer I'll be helping teach people how to do cool things with the Raspberry Pi. For that reason, one of my previous professors let me borrow her Raspberry Pi so I could get accustomed to using it and try out some of the projects and applications we'll be teaching.

Unfortunately, no one could find the login password, and we decided that it would be easier if I just reinstalled the OS using NOOBS, since there wasn't anything of great importance saved to the SD card. Everything is running properly now, and I've been having fun with this piece of tasty computer pastry. Maybe it'll even give me an excuse to add Python to my List of Programming Languages I Have a Vague Understanding Of.

Have any of you used a Raspberry Pi before?

* This may or may not actually qualify as a secret society, but it sounds a whole lot more exciting when marketed as such.

I've been researching this for a long while yet, and they are capable of some awesome things!

The more I see, the more I want.
Game consoles, Computers, arcade machines. You name it.
I was considering turning one into a dedicated arcade console, and running my own game from it.

i haven't, but being that this thing costs maybe forty bucks, i was considering to get one just to put it in a lego-block case and have myself a handy little computer

A Nite Shadow and a Raspberry Pi would be a most excellent combination.

I've even seen people use a Raspberry Pi to control their automatic sprinkler system. The prototype I saw connects to the Internet to check whether it's been raining in your area, and it turns on the sprinklers only if it hasn't been raining. If you have a little bit of Python knowledge (and perhaps one of the Raspberry Pi accessories), you can make the Pi do pretty much whatever you want it to.

Fireball3k: Yeah, the Raspberry Pi is very economical - and very portable, too.

isn't there an official windows distro in the works for the raspberry pi? given that i'm pretty much useless with linux compared to my knowledge of windows, that could be something i'd want to look into if i ever got one

That's another cool thing about the Raspberry Pi: There's a free version of Windows 10 designed for the Pi. I haven't tried that before, though.