Many years ago I spent a lot of time learning about electronics. It was great fun, I can’t remember specific things I built, but learning what resistors and capacitors do was fascinating.

I haven’t really thought about this much as my interests have been concentrated on computers and programming, but recently my interest has been peaked again.

The CodeNewbie and Hanselminutes podcasts have been running a month of stuff about making things and doing clever things with hardware called #Marchisformakers, this began to start me thinking about this stuff again.

Yesterday a friend of mine was showing me what he had been doing with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It is amazing what you can do with these tiny bits of technology and I was very impressed.

Now I am thinking what mini project could I play around with and which piece of hardware should I base it on. I don’t know much about the two platforms yet but I have found a blog post that introduces the two. My current thoughts are to start with the Raspberry Pi, it is a UK technology and it uses a linux OS (which I have some knowledge of).

Being a windows developer, most of my programming knowledge is with C# and Visual Studio. To use my existing knowledge I could install and use MONO, which means I can program the Raspberry Pi using C# (see here for more details about MONO on Raspberry Pi).

But deciding on a language to use, doesn’t help me choose a project. I haven’t even got myself a Raspberry Pi yet so I may decide more once I have had a play around with it. Thoughts so far include getting wi-fi to work on the Raspberry Pi or maybe adding a camera and sticking it somewhere and taking pictures, maybe even build myself a baby monitor (might go down well with the wife if its baby related)