Rapberry Pi Newbie

[Stroke2007]

I'm Rapberry Pi Newbie, have seen it used on The Gadget Show and have ordered the starter kit.
I'm Long Term out of work due to a massive Brain Injury in March 2007, claasified as a Stroke, bought on by Flu& Pnemonia.

Plymouth Poly graduate with HND in Mechanical & Production Engineering in 1990.
I have experience in 6 CNC programming languages plus, BBC Basic & Machine code, as well as in introduction to Visual Basic, I did SAMS learn Visual Basic in 21 Days back in 1992.

Can anyone advise a good starting project to cut my teeth on. I hope to pass on some of my knowledge to my 2 Children

[DBryant]

Depends on what your interests are I guess.

You could start by playing with a few different distros and become familiar with the environment. It means the kids can then have their own set-ups simply be re-booting with a different SD card. XBMC will give a media player and expose you to less Unix and such, whereas other distros will give you more of the Unix/Linux, programming and other delights.

You might try installing and running a local web server, familiarising yourself with the delights of their configuration. Then go on to write some web pages, investigate HTML, Javascript, CGI bin and other web-related technologies.

You could investigate the GPIO and get into some hardware, say reading temperature/pressure from a sensor or driving a robot arm for example. You will have access the GPIO registers and you might do this with some shell programming, or learn some Python, write some C/C++ and interface with some web pages.

Search these forums to see what other folk are doing and go to http://www.themagpi.com/ for the current (and back) issues of the MagPI magazine for a wealth of good info and background.

Good luck