Friday 4 May 2012

My Raspberry Pi is here

At long last my Pi has arrived. I've placed a Debian image on a new SD Card and will be powering her up as soon as I can find a spare keyboard and mouse. Here is a picture of her:

4 comments:

VeeBee said...

Was going to ask what connectors it had, then I found this...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190334

I spent about a year writing code with one of these...

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,792&Prod=S3EBOARD

Though the Pi looks more fun.

Doesn't look like the Pi can do analogue i/o?

Seems an odd omission....

RetroCoder said...

The Pi has a GPIO connector for i/o work. Details are here: http://elinux.org/Rpi_Low-level_peripherals

VeeBee said...

Hmmm

Just seems odd with the aim of the board to be educational, there's no on-board A/D or D/A.

Cost I 'spose.

Let me know when Cavern Fighter runs. ;)

RetroCoder said...

The idea of the Raspberry Pi is to encourage children to program. I learnt on a ZX81 and a Spectrum, both of which didn’t have accessible I/O as standard. The aim is to get the kids to enjoy and understand programming. The Pi can be expanded if a school wanted to go down this route or they could buy a dedicated micro controller. The Pi isn’t trying to beat all the other devices on the market but to provide a cheap, robust programming tool. Yes it would be nice to switch on lights and motors but programming is more than just interfacing with hardware. Remember that the board has networking as standard. Kids could try integrating with a well know access control system…..