For the purpose of introduction, Raspberry Pi is a series of small single board computers, created by Raspberry Pi Foundation in February 2012.
The vision behind these miniature computers was to teach basic computer science in the schools in and around the UK and in various developing countries, which is identified by the mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, that is, "To put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world".
However, due to their low cost and longer durability, Raspberry Pi surpassed the anticipation of its makers by becoming hugely popular with hackers and novices alike. It further went on to become the best-selling PC in the UK of all time.
The following figure shows the timeline of the release of various models of Raspberry Pi up until 2015:
February 2016 marked the advent of a third generation Raspberry Pi Model 3B over Model 2B, which is the current latest Raspberry Pi in the market as of the time of writing this chapter and also the one which we would be using. To give you some idea about its prowess, the following are its specifications:
- Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU
- 1GB RAM
- BCM43438 wireless LAN and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on board
- 40-pin extended GPIO
- 4 USB 2 ports
- 4 Pole stereo output and composite video port
- Full size HDMI
- CSI camera port for connecting a Raspberry Pi camera
- DSI display port for connecting a Raspberry Pi touchscreen display
- Micro SD port for loading your operating system and storing data
- Upgraded switched Micro USB power source up to 2.5A
All this on a board slightly bigger than the size of a credit card. Isn't it amazing?
Notice the specifications, there is a 64-bit Quad Core 1.2 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM there and much more, and the cost of all of this goodness is around 40 euros, which make it one of the most powerful and yet inexpensive computers ever sold.
Raspberry Pi essentials Kit is one of the many popular kits available in the market, bundling the bare essentials to get you started. Its contents are shown in the following figure:
One of the good things about this kit is that it includes a 16-GB microSD card (also known as a NOOBS card) with New Out Of the Box Software (NOOBS) preinstalled in it. NOOBS , which is an operating system (OS) installer.
This OS installer already comes bundled with Raspbian, which is a free operating system based on Debian, which in turn is one of the earliest operating systems based on Linux kernel and hence contains a lot of goodies from the original Linux kernel.
Raspbian is specifically optimized to run on Raspberry Pi hardware and also the officially supported operating system by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Raspbian comes preinstalled with plenty of software for education, programming, and general use. It has Python, Scratch, Sonic Pi, Java, Mathematica, and more. We shall be building our beacon on top of Raspbian itself.