Raspberry Pi
I was lucky enough for my birthday to get not one, but two Raspberry Pi‘s (model B). And since it’s holiday time, I thought it worked well with the Christmas tree:
Here you can see the Pi with it’s “Maker Pi” box, HDMI, Ethernet, USB, SD, and GPIO all connected.
In addition, the gifts came with:
- Raspberry Pi User Guide (highly recommended… everything you need to know to get started all in one place)
- Make: Raspberry Pi Starter Kit (and all the goodies held within)
Upon arrival I got the USB cards flashed with the Raspian “Wheezy” Linux distro (something I’d never done), got myself setup with a custom Linux login (something I’d never done), installed the Python GPIO library, and even got Chromium installed as the web browser. I had to buy a powered USB hub, and through that hooked up a wireless keyboard and mouse (the Pi powers itself over the usb directly). I have no spare monitor, so right now it’s hooked up to my main LED flatscreen in the living-room over HDMI: The text is so small… and so far away…. I recently just soldered up the Adafruit Pi Cobbler which will let me interface its GPIO pins with a breadboard. And shortly I hope to make some LED’s blink.
It’s nice to be back on the command-line again… reminds me of my DOS days (and the Apple ][ before that), and Linux is turning out to not be as scary as I thought it would be. And it doesn’t hurt that my neighbor is IT 😉 It will be interesting to see how this compares to the Arduino, already I’m learning that the Pi is 3.3v compared to the Arduino’s 5v, it has no ADC, nor realtime clock. All things that can be purchased separately. But I’m excited to see what it can do.
Here’s a few other interesting links I’ve ran across:
- Pi Store (App store for the Pi)
- The MagPi (online Raspberry Pi magazine)
- Raspberry Pi Web IDE (I’ll be installing this soon…)
- RasPiTV (Youtube for the Pi)
- RPi Hub (Wiki)