Thanks for that, love your description of the RPi " very important research and development hardware", how long did you have to wait for delivery? I was lucky, managed to get in before the sites crashed. But going to have to order revision 2 I do believe!
It will be interesting to see how the server runs on it (when it runs properly), I didn’t think the client would run particularly well but for such a cheap piece of equipment, having the server on such a cheap piece of arm based hardware running linux, setting up redundancy and even multiple remote servers would be awesomely cheap and sending updates via SD card to those remote ones not so well connected would be very convenient! Really, for non-essential services that don’t require perfect timing, it could even be used as an effective remote IO rather than having to spend unnecessary amounts on other hardware.
I think this is a project well worth doing!! 