Single board or “open-source” PCs have become a hot market, with the Raspberry Pi selling in the millions and competitors getting in on the act, including Intel’s recently announced MinnowBoard. These PCs have open designs that can be replicated by other hardware companies, are inexpensive to manufacture as components get smaller and can run Android, Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux.
Here’s a look at the open-source PCs that are available and finding a number of uses, including as media servers.
Raspberry Pi
The Pi has caught the imagination of hackers, programmers and 13-year-old Henry Budden, who wrote a tutorial on how to take advantage of the open-source PC. The PC has been widely used as a Web server and a media server with the XBMC program, which serves multimedia files to TV sets. The Pi is compatible with Android, and has been used by programmers to write and test smartphone and tablet applications. Other interesting projects involve jukeboxes, an autonomous underwater vehicle and a coffee machine.
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