What's a Raspberry PI?

Nutshell

A "Raspberry Pi" is a small form-factor embedded computer system designed for the educational market. Like Arduino, it has been picked up by hobbyists and artists as a low-cost computing platform.

What It's Not

A full powered desktop computer replacement.

Embedded systems by design are low-powered, efficient, & optimized for specific purposes. This means you can run a small project off of a battery for quite a while, but you're not going to be playing your favorite AAA first person shooter...

Pros vs Cons

Pros:

• small
• cheap
• GPIO (General Purpose IO) pins for physical computing
• you run plenty of open source applications

Cons:

• slower
• may or may not have full graphics acceleration (OpenGL / OpenGL ES)
• requires knowledge and familiarity with GNU/Linux and the commandline
• currently Java-based applications like Processing are exceedingly slow...

Resources

• Raspberry PI website
• eLinux RPi Beginners
• openFrameworks on Raspberry PI

But wait, there's more!

The RPI is not the only embedded system out there ...

• BeagleBoard: one of the original embedded Linux platforms
• Udoo: faster with Dual & Quad cores as well as more RAM, has Arduino mega pinout, pricier
• etc ...