Introduction To The Hardware: Raspberry Pi

In the last post, we have already discussed about the arduino in quite detail. (If you haven't read that post, you may first go and read it here.)

Raspberry Pi: An Introduction

Raspberry Pi (introduced in 29th February 2012) is a single board computer which will act as a mini PC when peripherals like keyboard, mouse and display are connected to it. It is used for Robotic as well IoT applications. It may be slower than the normal desktops or laptops but it has their major abilities and offers comparatively lower power consumption. All in all it is a credit card (a bit larger) sized computer board which can do many things that an average desktop can do (like word processing etc.). The Raspberry Pi foundation provides the Raspbian OS and the NOOBS OS, we can install third party OS also.

Somewhere down the line, it is more than a computer as it provides access to the on-chip hardware (i.e. GPIOs) for several applications. We can connect devices like motor, sensor etc. to it and control them. It provides on chip I2C, SPI, I2S and UART modules.

There are many models of Raspberry Pi available (comparison of some models is listed below-source of image).

Components of Raspberry Pi

There are various components in the board. Below are some of them:

• HDMI- We can connect the display (any monitor will work) using a HDMI Cable.
• GPIO- General Purpose Input Output connection points that gives it the ability to connect to the real world.
• ARM CPU/GPU- The CPU (central processing unit) handles computation whereas the GPU (graphics processing unit) will handle the Graphics Output.
• Power- 5V micro usb power connector.
• Ethernet- Only on Model B. Allows wired network access.
• SD Card Slot- A full-sized SD card slot. An SD card with an OS installed is required for booting the raspberry. You can download the OS and save it to the card.
• CSI- Provides electrical connection between Broadcom Processor and Pi camera.

So this was an introduction to the Raspberry Pi, in the upcoming posts we will get to know about how we can work with the same. We learnt about both the Arduino & the Raspberry Pi, but we are still unclear about when to use which. Hence we will discuss the pros and cons of both of them in the next post which will enable us to make the choice according to the need in the application.