Raspberry Pi and the Impulse Buy
Discovering some dusty treasure in an old shoe box
When I moved out of my family home I wasn't quite aware of the challenge at hand. I owned a lot of stuff. Like, more than I thought I did. Arguably more than a lot of my friends did. I'm not saying this in a pissing-contest kind of way, no. More of a "with this kind of behaviour I'm going to end up on a channel 4 documentary", sort of way.
I don't think I'd noticed the full extent of my impulse buying and hoarding during University as I always had two houses to spread it over; my student house and my parents' house. I'd kill time during boring lectures by surfing Amazon and eBay, buying anything which took my fancy. My 'watch list' is brimming with an eclectic mix of crap ranging from Polaroid cameras, to accordions and decorative stags head to name a few. Last year I graduated University, and relocated 330 miles to Reading to be a full-time software engineer with the same company that I did a placement with. My parents saw this as an opportunity to turn my old bedroom into a walk-in wardrobe and swiftly painted over, binned, and bagged all of my childhood memories ready for me to collect and move into my substantially smaller Berkshire bedroom. It's a good job I'm good at Tetris.
In one of the many shoe boxes used to hold miscellaneous items either too fragile, small, or... odd to be thrown in with the bigger category boxes such as clothes, toiletries or decorative stag heads, was my Raspberry Pi. My little Raspberry Pi. So tiny and dusty in its credit card-sized plastic case. Among an array of resistors, transistors, LED's and breadboards. All purchased during a flurry of excitement when the Pi was first released with so many hopes and aspirations. So many projects in mind to hack together. There must be close to £100 sitting in that shoe box! I could do with an extra £100 right now... It's really made me excited though. I'm going to set it all up and see what comes out of it. Add it to the ol' portfolio. The only caveat is that I no longer have a proper monitor to use with it, so I'll need a KVM switch to get it to work with my laptop screen. I'll try not to let the switch ending up in the same shoe box.
As a way to make sure that I actually do something with it, I'm making a promise to you, Internet stranger (or not stranger)... I'm going to build something. And I'll keep you updated. But please don't all comment asking for updates at once, my DISQUS account is crashing with all of the traffic, so be considerate.
