How do you like them, raspberries?

It has been a while since this thread was posted and I am wondering how people hack it nowadays as the hardware configuration has much improved in Raspberry Pi 3. I am new to Pi, any inputs or good resources to learn and hack would be most welcome.

I ruined mine when I thought I could do some basic soldering and instead shorted the damn thing. I suppose I could have bought another one, and was planning to. But kept needlessly delaying it until the "fire" died out.

Story of my life.

Good resource for I/O stuff: WiringPi

While RPi did a huge job in making SBCs popular for hobbyists, nowadays there are a huge variety of other choices: Catalog of 81 open-spec, hacker friendly SBCs

It also pays to review the features of the different Cortex cores (List of ARM microarchitectures - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), and note that a greater A number doesn't necessarily mean more performance. As of right now, the best readily available core choice is an A15. There aren't many (if any) SBCs out with the newer performance cores (A57, A7x, etc)

Separately but related, would be cool to make a server farm out of these: World’s smallest quad-core Linux SBC starts at $8

Thank you, I just got started with my Pi 3, which truly lives up to its name of a mini-computer. I am just in awe of the technology growth when I look at a decade back where I owned a CPU much less capable than Pi 3 today, consuming lot of power and making a lot of noise and way more expensive. SBCs simply rock!

I've been thinking about that as well. I think about my first computer, the Epson Apex (not sure which model number, think it was the 20). Crazy remembering that it had a selectable switch on the front for overclocking. Anyway, I've thought about how many times faster these small SBCs are.

Epson is awesome, they have the old manuals for these on their support site: https://files.support.epson.com/pdf/apexp_/apexp_u1.pdf