What is a Raspberry Pi? And what can you do with it?
The Raspberry Pi is a very small computer, almost the size of a credit card,
but it is quite powerful and it can run a lot of applications.
So what can you do with this board?
Here are some examples of projects that you can easily do with a Raspberry Pi.
You could automate your home, make your personal devices smarter with IO
or internet of things.
You can also build a retro gaming console, create a security or alarm system,
host the server for a web or mobile application.
You can even run a Minecraft server on your pi.
You can also program robots such as robotic arms, drones, Hexa
pos mobile robots, etc
you can create a smart mirror,
install different operating systems. For example, Raspberry Pi, Os
Ubuntu Windows,
IOT and much more or simply use the Raspberry Pi as your own portable computer.
And of course, this list is far from being exhaustive.
You can
many more projects online and you can also
get inspired to create your own custom projects.
One great thing about Raspberry Pi is the community.
So what does the community aspect bring to you.
Well, you can easily see what other people do with their Raspberry Pi.
You can ask your questions,
get some help from more advanced users and you can also
collaborate with other people on similar projects and progress together.
Raspberry Pi was created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The goal of the foundation is to make computers and digital,
making available for as many people as possible for about $50.
You can get a Raspberry Pi board and a complete setup to run.
It will not be that much more expensive.
Now, let's talk about the different versions that you can find.
The first Raspberry Pi board was released in 2012.
Then the foundation continued to develop new
iterations to make the board more powerful,
add more functionalities, make it easier to use and
develop the community.
In 2015,
the Raspberry Pi I I was released with
much more computation power than the first one.
Then the Raspberry Pi three came in 2016 with again, more computation power.
And this time, the wifi feature was directly integrated inside the board.
So you don't have to use a Wi Fi USB dongle anymore.
In 2019,
the Raspberry Pi four was released better performance than the version three,
a few changes in the external connectors to make it
compatible with modern applications
and an increased amount of ram.
And finally,
we have the Raspberry Pi five released in 2023 twice as powerful as the version four,
an additional fan and camera connectors and a few differences in the architecture
that makes it even better.
The Raspberry Pi bolt up to version three only had one gigabyte
of Ra M which was already quite good at the time.
Now, for the Raspberry Pi four and five, you can choose between two gigs
bytes, four gigabytes and even eight gigabytes of ram,
which is becoming quite huge.
Now, what can you find on the board? So in the middle, you can see lots of components.
Those are the CPU the ra M,
the Wi Fi and Bluetooth chips and all other
components required to make the Raspberry Pi work.
Now let's focus on the connectors.
You have four USB ports including two USB
three in blue one Ethernet port with Gigabit
Ethernet one USB C
port to power on the board,
two micro hdmi ports with four K video support for two external displays.
You also have two ports that can be used for either a camera or a display module,
a PCI port,
a 40 pins or GP header that we will use
a lot during this course to control different hardware components.
With Python programming GPI means general purpose input output.
This header is the same for the Raspberry Pi two B three B,
Raspi four and Raspberrypi five.
You also have one fan connector here which is new on Raspberry Pi five
and I'm gonna finish with the back here with a slot for
the micro SD card in which you will install the operating system.
All right, now, you should have a slightly better idea of what the Raspberry Pi is.
What's its purpose and the applications you can do with it
when learning about a new technology.
It's always a good idea to try to understand the big picture first
and now we can dive in.