Almost six years ago, a single-board computer came on the market and changed the game for all the innovators. The Raspberry Pi is a dream machine for all —gaming consoles, home streaming, VPN servers, and much more. But before you get started you need to learn about Raspberry Pi. So here is everything you need to know if you’re building something with it.
The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer about the size of a deck of cards. It uses a system on a chip, that integrates the CPU and GPU in a single circuit, with the RAM, USB ports, and other components soldered onto the board for an all-in-one package. Although it doesn’t have onboard storage, it has an SD card slot you can use to store all your files. All of its benefits include it being small, not using much power, and relatively inexpensive.
The nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation originally designed the Pi as a budget-friendly computer for teaching programming, but it quickly became popular among innovators. Before the current model was launched, many earlier models were released, some with multiple revisions. The latest model, the Raspberry Pi 4, has a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM CPU, a 500MHz VideoCore VI GPU, and 1GB of RAM—though you can upgrade to 4GB of RAM.
At the very beginning, the Raspberry Pi came in two versions at two different prices: the Model A ($25) and Model B ($35). Model A was for when you needed less hardware as it had one less USB port, no Ethernet port, and half the RAM. Soon the manufacturing costs started falling and the Pi gained more attention. Eventually, they were able to increase the hardware specs of the device while keeping the cost same. They unified all models with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015 and the Raspberry Pi 3 in 2016. If you look closely, the best model was always available around $35. The current generation model has the following hardware:
The Raspberry Pi comes with a set of 26 exposed vertical pins on the board. These pins are a General Purpose Input/Output interface that is purposely not linked to any specific native function on the board. The GPIO pins are explicitly for the end-user to have low-level hardware access directly to the board for the purposes of attaching other hardware boards, and other hardware devices.
To get your project up and running you’ll need a few things:
It is a mini-computer that allows you to build all sorts of custom projects. This includes learning to build your own computing hardware or starting programming languages like Python or Scratch. The latest model is a bit tough to find since it’s in such high demand. The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is the most flexible model. It includes ports four USB-A ports, an ethernet jack, a microSD card slot, micro-USB for power, HDMI out, as well as connections for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas.
Previous versions of the Pi used micro USB for power delivery, but the Raspberry Pi 4 upgrades to USB-C. While certain phone chargers might power the Pi just fine, but buying a power adapter designed for the Pi is recommended. The USB chargers you commonly use might not provide enough power to the board.
The latest models use microSD cards for storage, while the original model A and B used a regular SD card. Not all SD cards are good to go with, though, so you can buy the official Raspberry Pi microSD card (which comes with an operating system preloaded) or a tested compatible one, like the SanDisk 32GB Ultra. You’ll also need a way to plug the SD card into your computer, like this USB adapter.
Although, this is optional but is recommended. Instead of having your board out in the open, it’s a good idea to protect it with a case. The cases are still new to the market but are a great option for their built-in heatsink.
Depending on your project, you may not need a mouse and keyboard permanently attached to your Pi, but you’ll probably want them on hand for the initial setup.
Also,
To connect your Raspberry Pi to a monitor. A USB-A cable would also work, depending on your monitor’s port options.
Before you start using your Pi, it’s better to do a basic software update. We have completed the setup, tested the connection, and now all we need to do is a system-wide software update. Although the interface has come a long way, you still need to get your updates done.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Unless you have a reason to skip an update, just hit the Y key to confirm all the changes as they appear. Even on a brand new installation where you’re using the latest model, expect to give 20-30 minutes to the updates.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer designed and manufactured by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to making computers and programming instruction as accessible as possible to the widest number of people. This invention became the game changer for all the innovators out there. It is a budget-friendly system-on-a-chip setup built around the Broadcom BCM2835 processor–a tiny but powerful mobile processor commonly used in cellphones. Although you need to remember that it is not an outright replacement for your desktop computer or laptop. You cannot run Windows on it, although you can run many distributions of Linux.
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