If I would buy a Raspberry Pi 2, I would get Mathematica for free. http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ That seems like a fantastic deal. Also it seems possible to do image processing in Mathematica, and that would be wonderful for me.
Has anyone tried it?
I’ve used Mathematica sporadically over the years. It’s certainly handy in some situations, and some people probably use it for almost everything.
It seems like the major limitation of the RPi deal is that you can’t run the included copy of Mathematica anywhere but on the RPi. So it’ll be slower than running on a regular computer, and more of a pain to hook up to a screen to see the interface. Image processing is especially resource intensive, so it’d be especially noticeable in your planned use case.
There seems to be a remote desktop program on the link above, I can’t tell if it only is for a licensed version - or the RPi particular? But that would certainly make it a bit more pleasant experience if the RPi runs slowly(since then I can do other things). The new RPi also has 4 cores on 900mhz, so my hope is that it wont choke too much. The few tutorials I’ve seen on image processing is very impressive.
I did order a RPi 2, so I will most certainly know in not too many days.
The announcement blog post mentions that you can use the full Mathematica interface over X, which is pretty normal in the *nix world if you want to remotely use a program with a GUI. So yeah, you could use your computer to do other things while Mathematica is chugging away on a problem in another window.
Yeah, it’ll probably be fine. Besides, they’re really neat and useful devices even if they didn’t have Mathematica at all, so I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
I’m really surprised, (I’m on the RPi now)
I was more thinking in the line of the old 486(four eightysix), I’m that old that my big brother had one - the awesome 486 - and this is not anything like it. This is probably 30 times faster than that or even more?
The Mathematica programming seems very different from javascript, I haven’t got my head wrap around that yet, but this is most likely one of my best buys ever, or one that should have been the best? I wish I had this when I was young. Maybe I would have been more involved in mathematics instead of image and art?
For now I don’t even think I need to use Pi over X.
I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I might be able to answer some questions if you run into trouble, although there are definitely experts elsewhere – I just don’t know where.
Speed-wise: yeah. Things are fast these days. For some reason, you can buy watches with 4-core 1.4 GHz processors.