The image below is my first Raspberry Pi computer.  It's an amazing little thing and I decided to purchase one ($35 USD) so I can connect it to my weather station and upload its data, in 15 minute intervals, to the Internet and my FTP site.  Why?  Well I love data if you haven't figured that out by now, and I want to give back to the community.

So far I've installed the Raspbian Linux kernel on a 4GB SD card and got it to recognize and connect an Edimax Wifi dongle(sp). I did all this while hooked up to my big screen TV.  I even booted into the X windows server that came with the kernel, very nice and slick.

The next step is to install the python weather module that handles reading the weather data, pushes the data online, and make a cron job to upload the data my FTP site. I think my Friday night is going to be fun, just don't tell my wife!

Anyway, this got me thinking about putting Rapidminer on a Pi.  Why? Well if it can be done, then you could then have a data mining system on a computer the size of a credit card. Plus it just has a simple cool factor about it. So I ordered another Pi and plan on installing Java on it and then Rapidminer. I hope to record the events as best as I can and post it for you later.

I love my Raspberry Pi!

I have a small army of them and I use them for all kinds of projects. I used one for my weather station, I built a RapidMiner Server cluster once, and I use them to tweet out my posts

They are so versitale and fun! They make great gifts for kids that are into comptuers and tech. Here are a few kits and boards I recommend.

• Raspberry Pi
• RapidMiner