Creativity Unleashed, With the Help of a Little Pi

The Open source approach has good potential for social good if is used in a proper way.  The open source ecology encompasses a wide range of opens: open source software, open source hardware, open networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents, and so on.  Raspberry Pi has been a part of it, nurturing creativity and sharing.

From the New York Times:

Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer the size of a credit card, has captured the imaginations of students, educators and tinkerers around the world since it became available in 2012. Earlier this month, the organization behind the computer announced that it had sold its three millionth device.

The computer was first developed by faculty members at the University of Cambridge in Britain who had noticed their incoming computer science students were ill-prepared for a high-tech education. They decided to build an inexpensive device that students could learn from.

The result was an astonishingly simple product, delivered as a bare circuit board. Its innovation comes in its size, seizing upon a trend of fitting computing power on small hardware that has become a standard of smartphone development. While connecting Raspberry Pi to a keyboard and monitor recreates something like a conventional computer, its simplicity and adaptability has fostered far more creative applications, from miniature arcade games to a computerized balloon that has traveled to the brink of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Model B computer, the most popular version, is available for $35.

The Raspberry Pi Model B Computer

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/technology/personaltech/a-breakdown-of-the-raspberry-pi-computer.html?ref=personaltech&_r=1