When Raspberry Pi co-creator Eben Upton helped come up with the idea of an inexpensive Linux-powered single board computer (SBC), he honestly thought, " We would sell about 1,000, maybe 10,000 in our wildest dreams . We thought we would make a small number and give them out to people who might want to come and read computer science at Cambridge." He was wrong.

The maker community fell in love with the idea of the Raspberry Pi and by the time the Raspberry Pi Model B first appeared, the initial run gone in hours with 100,000 units sold in the first day. Two years after it first went to market, more than 2.5 million Raspberry Pi SBCs have sold. Not bad for a computer powered by a 700MHz ARM11 chip, 512MBs of RAM, and requires an SD or MMC memory card for storage.

Doesn't sound like much does it? But this credit-card sized computer has been used for smartglasses , smartphones , servers , tablets , and, believe it or not, supercomputers !

That's only the tip of the iceberg. There's far more you can with Raspberry Pi SBCs than use them to duplicate the functionality of other kinds of computers. Here's my pick of projects I've found especially interesting.

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