What is the 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 IoT or Internet of Things.
You can also build a retro gaming console, create a security on alarm system, host a 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, hexapods, 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 find 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 USD, you can get a Raspberry Pi board and a complete setup to run.
It would 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 two 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 the 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 boards up to version three only had one gigabyte of Ram, which was already quite good
at the time.
Now for the Raspberry Pi four and five, you can choose between two gigabytes, 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 Ram, 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 4K 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 Gpio header that we will use a lot during this course to control different hardware components.
With Python programming, Gpio means general purpose input output.
This header is the same for the Raspberry Pi to be three B Raspberry Pi four and Raspberry Pi five.
You also have one fan connector here, which is new on Raspberry Pi five, and I'm going to finish with
the back here with a slot for the microSD 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 is 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.