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Comment by w0utert | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably missing something crucial here, but I was just wondering why you actually need the Raspberry Pi?

I'm don't own any Android devices so I'm not an expert, but wasn't the idea that you could easily install and run a Linux userland with all your tools, directly on the Transformer Prime?

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Writing, compiling, and executing Java and Haskell code can't be done (easily, at least) on the Transformer Prime, so he's just exploiting the batter life (along with it's inexpensiveness, and effortless syncing) of the Transformer and using it as a mobile access point to his pi where he can code.

The question is really: Why an RPi, specifically, instead of, e.g., your macbook or any other desktop-class hardware you have at home? When thinking of a development machine, the first thing that comes to mind is pretty much NOT an RPi. In fact, for my own RPi development, it is more efficient to develop under Linux (possibly run in a VM), and cross-compile to ARM than it is to compile on the RPi directly.

The reason for the Raspberry Pi is that it meets the following criteria:

1) Always available (MacBook may not be open and charged) 2) Energy efficient 3) No variable cost (as opposed to EC2 or Linode) 4) Very powerful when headless (Linux is better than OS X here)

It's not the most powerful backend but that wasn't really the point of this project. The point was that for $35 I added a dedicated Linux backend to my already awesome Transformer tablet.

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