You have no idea how strongly I hate saying this, but raspberry pi is currently better then my pandaboards.

The raspberry pi is very slow compared to the pandaboard, but a lot of things just work better. Mostly thanks to the huge hype around it and the fact that
the community is huge and problems get solved quickly:
So the good things:

• It is more stable, currently on pandaboard I cannot watch a decent movie without it crashing.
• The 3.3V gpio is a lot easier to use. On pandaboard I had problems with converting bidirectional signals from 1.5 to 3.3/5V at high-ish speeds.
  Needing (expensive) equipment to be able to debug this.
• A lot of ready to use modules exists (w1-gpio, lirc_rpi, etc).
• Most stuff plays fine.
• CHEAP!

Downsides:

• No mpeg2 decoding on gpu, cpu is to slow. (can be fixed by buying license.)
• POWER HUNGRY.  My rasberry pi model b uses more power idle then my pandaboard, even when playing a 1080p movie, the pandaboard uses less energy.
  Model a is a little better, but still uses more then the pandaboard at idle (crazy!!)
• No kernel headers with the 3.6 kernel, so I could not easily use my gpio-remote kernel module, but I managed to use lirc to provide me this signal on one of the pins.
• slow..
• no ethernet on model A,  I realy miss this.
• no normal level serial port.

So now I have everything setup: IR receiver, IR blaster, RF transmitter (so I can control the lights) and 1-wire bus for the temperature sensors.

Currently the IR module is fed from the 3.3V power, it seems to be using 8mA max (this is making it continuously sending out a 1) so should be safe, giving I have no ethernet I assume I could draw more then 50mA from the 3.3V line.  The rest is powered from the 5V line, I want to change the IR receiver to the 3.3V version in the future, but that should only add another 5mA.

A small tip when soldering small stuff (I noticed a few times at work students fiddling with this), and you need to hold something small. You could put it in a vice, or try to hold it in a plier (but you loose a hand this way).
There is a very simple easy solution, take the plier, and use a rubber band, works wonders: