Raspberry Pi is a hand-sized computer developed by University Of Cambridge Computer Lab.


Oops. Wrong pi.

I bet you’re wondering,”That doesn’t look like my computer!” But is one nonetheless.  It has a USB port, Ethernet, headphone jack, RCA video port, SD card slot and a power adapter, along with all the necessary chips to make it a basic computer.

raspimodelb

Raspberry Pi is not meant to be your personal laptop. It’s meant to be used for designing robots, tracking devices, clocks or anything you want that could use a “computer” for a brain. But when you do hook it up with a keyboard, mouse, ethernet, power and a monitor to program it, it will bring up a normal desktop.

raspberry-pi-vnc

Once you get on the desktop, there are a couple apps already downloaded for you. Midori is the web browser they give you. It is good for downloading apps to help you, but not so good at just surfing the web, because it can be slow.

Scratch is another app they give you. It is a very basic computer programming app, more added on for fun.  And of course, they give you Idle, an app for programing in Python. This is the app you will most likely be using the most for programming whatever you are trying to build.

There are some cons to Raspberry Pi. As I said before, surfing the web can be extremely slow (at least for me), so don’t go buying it thinking it will be your browsing computer.  Also, I recommend buying a cheap USB keyboard instead of using you old Mac Keyboard(if you even kept it), since that’s what I tried and it I couldn’t write a word without it stretching the words oooooouuuuuuttttttttt.

a.baa-Old-Mac-Keyboard

Still, if you are an entrepreneur and you need a easy and cheap(25$) way of putting a brain into your product, or a kid trying to learn Python, or just anyone trying to learn Python, Raspberry Pi could be for you.  I will follow up with my RPi experiences in future posts.