Raspberry Pi Series Part 1: Laying Out The Basics

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It is thrilling to explore some of the possibilities technology can introduce. Hiking through mountain thickets for a herbalist, will not be quite an adventure without the interesting possibility to discover a new herb, an indigenous weed or a revolutionary cure for a rare disease. 

Have you never questioned yourself why a small business may begin from a garage, struggle through capitalist economies, but still rise to a global sized corporate? Sometimes these realms of the future appear minimalistic, like a scarce idea with nowhere to go, yet the yearning alone to solve life problems will in a beautiful but simple way, propel these ideas to the mountains higher above than NASA’s s next space-shuttle. It’s a similar possibility that a card-sized Linux micro invention introduced to technology students and enthusiasts alike, the Raspberry Pi.​

The Raspberry PI is a credit-card sized, Linux machine, that serves as a low-cost computing device for students and technology enthusiasts. It helps improve their programming and hardware skills. This device may appear small, cheap and ineffectual in the eyes of a novice. Behind this simplistic framework, however, is an underlying ability to execute functionalities as good as a modern day personal computer. With easy to use utilities, the raspberry can do many things like: run a word processor, play games, watch videos and run python programs.

Raspberry falls into the category of open hardware devices. Its main components include a c.p.u, graphics card, memory, USB and a controller. The c.p.u is a quad-core of about 1200 MHz based on the A.R.M cortex architecture and 1GB of RAM.

Although the original creators of raspberry intended to create a mini-device to teach children how to code and raise interest in computer science, the invention has outstood its setting to a variety of more advanced functionalities. All made possible by a vibrant community of computer engineers and hobbyists who saw its potential more than that of a just learning tool.

What however makes the raspberry a great micro-computer is its low power usage, mobility, and low processing power needs.

There is an assortment of things that a raspberry PI can do, the list is endless. From doing it yourself projects involving electronics interfaces to automating processes, building a supercomputer (like a group of students from Southampton university did). You may also launch the next nanosatellite to orbit the solar system or integrate raspberry pi with artificial intelligence for building robots.

The Raspberry Pi runs on a Linux kernel, various Linux distributions have been deployed by the Linux community. These distributions are founded on the basis of an operating system that can support chip-set software requirements.

This is because unlike personal computers that come with high memory capacity and RAM, the Raspberry Pi can only support a handful of internal storage and access memory. The following list contains 5 best raspberry OS Linux distributions in 2018 on which you can run your Raspberry PI.

  • Raspbian
  • Ada-fruit raspberry pi
  • arch Linux
  • X-bian
  • Qtonpi

A number of vendors will sell an SD card (secured card) pre-installed with the Raspbian Linux OS, later on after setting up your Raspberry PI, you can connect it to the Internet and update with the latest version of the OS.

Conclusion

In the next part of these series, we will show you the basic parts of a Raspberry Pi, essential peripheral devices, power and input/output devices. How all those parts work hand in hand in the creation of a powerful Linux machine will be the focus of successive features. Don’t miss out.