Raspberry Pi

I want to show you this little tiny computer. This is a Raspberry Pi. This Raspberry Pi has all the components that a big computer has, but maybe in a little smaller form. That is, it's not a huge processor, it's not a huge amount of memory, but it's enough to power a little computer. They really built this originally for cost savings and being able to learn about computers, so you can set this up and learn some about computers.

I also have it running other things. Back here, I have this monitor right here running off of a Pi that I have, just a looped video going, so it's just a little bit of eye candy for the screen back here. I also have three of these set up on my test network so I can test various things on it. This one in particular is a gaming one. I have RetroPie installed onto this, and so I have a lot of old retro games on here, and it's just a fun little thing that I can get on here and play some of those old games.

Compared with a laptop or a desktop

So let's go over this little Pi. This right here is a laptop, and it's meant to be portable, to be taken with you. This right here is a desktop, and it's made to stay in one spot. The desktop is easily upgradeable. We can add different features to it because of the space that a lot of different types of components fit inside of it, versus the laptop, which isn't as easy to upgrade.

Sometimes we don't want something that's easy to upgrade, fairly inexpensive, and is going to stay in one spot. That's kind of where this Retro Pi comes into play. The Retro Pi can do a lot of compute power for us, or monitoring, or little projects that we have. It just does a lot of cool stuff.

It's designed to be a small computer. It's a small computer, and it's specifically put out by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and they put it out there as a learning computer. But I can use it for things like digital signage or my lab. And then the OS on it is a Raspberry Pi OS, so there's a specific type of Linux that's been built for this Raspberry Pi, and then most Linux apps can operate on that. So it actually is quite robust in what it can deliver and what we can install on it and what we can do.

The benefits of it: it's small and inexpensive. But the drawbacks are there's not a lot of power to it. It's got a small chip on it, and so it's not going to win any amazing awards or do any amazing computational feats with this. It's really just something basic to get you up and running with a small computer.

What's on the board

Here's the Raspberry Pi. What we see here is we have a CPU right here, and then on the back side is where the RAM is, so this is the RAM on this machine. The memory storage is a SD card that you slide into it, so you can slide in whatever SD card size that you want for this. And of course it has the ports, so we see some USB ports, we see a network port, we've got an HDMI port, an audio port, and then there's interfaces that we could plug in or create things for this. And then we have power right here. So this is just a little tiny board.

This one in particular came with a case, and so what we can do is we can slide the case over the top of this. One thing we could also do with this, or some of the newer ones, because they have much more processing power, is there's a heat sink that goes onto here, and some of them even come with a little fan in the case. This is an older one, so it doesn't need all of that. But what I can do is I can snap on the back here. I'll snap the top of this case onto that, and there is then a lid that goes over top of this that we can snap on, and there is now the Raspberry Pi. So now I can plug this into a monitor or anything I want to be able to use it.

The operating system

I've logged into my Raspberry Pi just to show you what the operating system looks like. Really it's just a Linux operating system, so if you're familiar with Linux you'd be familiar with this. Instead of like Windows where the taskbar is across the bottom, we see it across the top here. We've got some icons similar to the icons that we would see within Windows. We can do some things like adjusting the speakers across over here. We see the start menu here, or the equivalent of the start menu, with a bunch of applications in here, and we see that there's some programming applications if you want to do some programming, and there's some accessories here if you want to bring up a calculator. So this just gives you some insight to what a Raspberry Pi OS looks like. It's a little more basic than like a Windows machine, but still has a lot of the same functionality.