In this section, we will be introducing you to Raspberry Pi, which is a completely functional computer built on a single circuit board:
Equivalent to the size of a credit card, this single board computer offers the following:
- 1GB RAM
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- A full HDMI port
- An Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- A Camera interface (CSI)
- A Display interface (DSI)
- A micro SD card slot
- A VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
- A 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU
- An 802.11n Wireless LAN
- Bluetooth 4.1
- Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
For less than 40 euros (which is the approximate cost of this board), for starters, you can simply connect a USB 2.0 mouse and keyboard to the USB ports, hook up a monitor via the HDMI port, and you already have the hardware setup of a personal computer:
If you compare the specs of Raspberry Pi to a traditional desktop or laptop, you will find it somewhat lacking in many aspects, which it makes up for through its compact design and its purpose for existence, which is to be a low-cost computing device designed to promote teaching the intricacies of computers in schools and developing countries. Having used this device, I have come to believe in this design policy so much that in fact, on a personal note, I would have really loved to have Raspberry Pi as my first computer rather than the Intel Celeron Desktop System with 20 GB of hard disk and 128 MB of RAM, which I received on my 15th birthday (after burning a hole in my parents' pocket).
After being initially introduced in February 2012 by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this little computer has found its way to the desks of children, novices, and hackers alike. It has been used to create tablets, retro gaming systems, low cost desktop PCs and can even be found in drone and robotics applications:
So much for the hardware; what about the software for Raspberry Pi? Since an operating system is an integral part of any computer, Raspberry Pi can be a host to any of the many operating systems such as the following:
- Raspbian
- CentOS
- Fedora
- Ubuntu MATE
- Kali Linux
- Ubuntu Core
- Windows 10 IoT Core[1]
- RISC OS
- Slackware
- Debian
- Arch Linux ARM
- Android Things
- SUSE
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
Out of these, one of the popular ones is Raspbian, which is a Debian-based operating system optimized for Raspberry Pi.
For first time users, installation can be quite a challenge; hence, to glide through it, New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS) is available, which is an easy operating system manager for Raspberry Pi.
So, that's it, for the introduction to Raspberry Pi and now you are familiar with it, we will be setting this little computer up as a Beacon in Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi.