Hi,
I'm new to both bitcoin and these forums, so hi everyone and I hope to enjoy it here
I like the idea of contributing to the network by running Bitcoin-Qt or similar software on whatever computer I keep on and online. I haven't got any computer that I'm willing to leave on all the time, and so I'm thinking maybe I could get some minimal thing to run bitcoind or whatever alternatives I may not be aware of, with enough power to "check and relay transactions" (as per
http://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet ) but little enough that fan cooling isn't needed thus avoiding undesirable noise, also enough storage space to hold the database for a few years to come, but in solid state form (say USB flash disk or similar) since hard disks generate undesirable noise and use more power.
I'm new enough to all this that I don't have a clue about others' efforts on the topic of dedicated hardware to do this, but first thing that comes to mind is there are all sorts of these ARM mini computers running Linux or Android. There's this Raspberry Pi thing, and then there's these Android USB stick mini computers that you take with you and connect to a TV set to watch multimedia content. From a hardware perspective, ideally I'd like an enclosure, so the multimedia mini computer would be more appealing, but then I'd also like a LAN port, which I'm not sure if these have. From a software perspective, I'm not sure if bitcoind has been compiled for either platform.
Any thoughts or pointers would be appreciated
Cheers,
Alex