Which is better ?
Has anyone used/hacked one of these to do anything useful? Or fun?
I am contemplating replacing my old freeview tuner/recorder with a Pi. It is showing some weird compression artifacts where, if the vision is all dark and moody, the compression on the sound is far too high leaving gaps and jumps.
Don't even look at the Microbit. It has limited capacity to do much on its own and is designed to be programmed via the Internet/another computer. It's still in its its infancy and was designed for 11-12 year olds to cut their teeth on programming. There are some out in the wild in schools and they are six months behind their original delivery schedule. Complex projects can be built around it but a considerable amount of additional hardware is needed as well as soldering skills as there's no I/O pins.
Have a look at some of these projects:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35824446
The Raspberry Pi however, offers a whole lot more. It can function as a standalone computer and has ports for keyboard screen and and mouse, has an integral Wifi (with v3) and input/output pins already in place. There's a whole range of add ons including cameras, LCD screens and the operating system, a version of Linux, arrives with Open Office.
- I've used mine to control stepper motors - I had planned to build a simple X-Y laser engraver - I just might buy a desktop laser cutter instead - can't beat 'more power'. I have other ideas now about deploying the stepper motors - a squirrel deterrent which will direct jets of water at the bird feeder when the camera image is decoded as a squirrel rather than a bird. Further research needed but I'm confident that the computer will control the stepper motors and servos needed to control a 'water cannon'.
- I've operated a blog using Wordpress, PHP, Apache web server, and MySQL database software.
- The office suite is functional
- I've tinkered with the Python programming language - the Microbit also uses Python I think.
There's plenty of TV programm steaming home cinema projects documented on the internet. Take your time to research them and have a go for yourself. You will not bankrupt yourself in doing so.