The Raspberry Pi boots from an SD card so I have loaded Raspbian onto a 4GB card and I'm looking to incorporate this tiny computer into my robotics project as Salvius's new main computer because it will weigh a lot less and having the laptop on there was overkill anyway. The Pi is a perfect fit for my projects because it gives me the processing power I need to run a light weight embedded server for controlling the robot. For its size the Pi has some pretty nice stats, in fact it out preforms my old IBM Thinkpad A21p.
Breakdown of the Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2:
- Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
- GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 512MB RAM
- 10/100 BaseT Ethernet
- HDMI
- Two USB 2.0
- RCA video
- SD card socket
- Powered from microUSB socket
- 3.5 mm audio out jack
- Size: 85.6 x 56 x 21 mm
From here
The setup for the Pi was relatively straight forward. My only recommendation to new users is to make sure that your SD card is formatted correctly and that you don't unplug your Pi before the setup is complete! A nice feature about the Raspberry Pi is that it can be run headless (no monitor) so I plan on setting mine up with SSH and the web interface that I have designed for controlling Salvius.