Pretty soon, all of your things will have Internet: your car, your refrigerator, perhaps even your desk. That proposition is getting even easier with a pair of announcements from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Microsoft that encourage the maker community to invest even more in building clever devices using minicomputers.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that makers can use to create smart devices for tasks such as home automation, gaming, or music. The newest version is a sizable improvement over its popular earlier version. It swaps out the single-core 700 MHz ARM processor for a more capable quad-core 900 MHz processor using the new ARMv7 instruction set. In layman's terms, that means much better performance, as multiple cores can operate separate tasks in parallel—and, in this case, at a faster speed. The new Raspberry Pi 2 also sports 1GB of RAM, doubling the previous version's 512MB. And as any computer user will tell you, you can never have too much memory. All of that comes at the same exact price as the original Raspberry Pi: $35.