What is a raspberry pi?
TSasha Smith
Posts: 27,302
in The Commons
I was looking for my package tracking info at Amazon and saw something about a raspberry pi. I asked out loud about it but got an answer about how to make a raspberry pie. Does anyone have any personal experience with this raspberry pi?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Its a mini computer for tinkerer who eg try to make theri own little robots. Usually comes with a very reduced version of a linux system as a basic programming system.
Here is a link to ummm err https://www.raspberrypi.org/
It's a small and very cheap computer. The basic Raspberry pi is just a circuit board about 4 inches long with some USB ports, an HDMI output, an ethernet socket and what they call the GPIO connector. You have to provide a power supply (USB phone charger type), USB keyboard and mouse, HDMI cable and TV for display and an SD card with the operating system on it to get it to work. You can download an operating system for free and put it onto an SD card. The ones I know of are verions of Linux and a version of RiscOS. It's aimed at people who want to experiment with programming and electronics.
In the UK there are companies who sell starter kits with everything you need exept the TV. There are people selling boxes for it and devices that plug into the GPIO port. I've got a Raspberry pi 2 in a small box with a "Piano hat". It's called a hat because it sits on top of the pi. You can get a range of different hats with sensors, displays and prototyping boards for building your own devices. The Piano hat has a row of touch sensors in the shape of a one octave keyboard and three buttons labelled octave up, down and instrument, with LEDs on each sensor.
There's Windows 10 IoT Core (IoT = "Internet of Things") for the Raspberry Pi 2 as well, which is available for free to the maker community:
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/iot
Note: It works only with the v2 of RPi, not the older v1 A+B versions. An .iso image is provided in the download section.
A lot of people use it as a "retro gaming box". There's alot of free ROM for old games.
If someone is suffering from nostalgia than it could be a cheap alternative.
There's a Linux distribution for the Pi called Retro Pi. It comes with emulators and a front end to run them that makes it easy. Just plug in a USB game pad and put your ROMs on the SD card or on a USB stick.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, there are many alternatives.
Alternatively, it's also the sound you get when you put your tongue between your lips, clinch them tightly and then recite "3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286..." while blowing.
A Raspberry Pi is a raspberry that goes on forever!
Like, transcendental, man.
Euler, Euler?, Anyone?
This makes me think off the early 1980s when I built my first computer from a kit. A Sinclair ZX81. 1kb of Ram, 64*48 pixel graphics. It was a beast... :) I learned programming in assembly on that one... Ah, the good old times...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
Ciao
TD
e by gum.
I had one of those as well. Had a 16K brick to plug onto the back for more memory. Oh the joys of loading a program from a cassette tape.
It was even better if you accidentally put one of the data tapes into your player at full volume...
I also added the external ram (the max was 64kb if I recall correctly).
Ciao
TD
Greetings,
The 16K brick kept falling out, too...and when that happened, you lost your program. And saving to tape wasn't exactly like pressing Ctrl-S; it was work.
Still, the basic manual had a Z80 instruction guide in the back, and you kind of HAD to learn assembly to do anything on it. I remember playing Mazogs and ZX Chess a lot, but mostly writing my own programs.
I've been interested in getting into the RasPi stuff, and I have an older board, but I don't have a real use case yet... It does seem very neat, though.
-- Morgan
RasPi 3 is available since today, at least here. Now with ARMv8 (64bit), WLAN and Bluetooth 4.1 (LE).
I built my ZX81 from a kit, you saved a bit of money that way. By some miracle mine actually worked!
I don't think Sinclair made more that a 16k expansion although I vauguely remember someone else advertising what seemed like a huge amout of memory back then. A straight 64k would be tricky, the Z80 has a maximum address range of 64k and to use all of that for RAM you would have to switch off the ROM and you wouldn't have an operating system. You could bank switch part of it though. Atari made an 8 bit computer with 128k that way even though the CPU could only address 64k.
I saw that today. I was on the Pimoroni site looking for info about the piano hat and saw it on their home page. And I couldn't resist it, after all, it isn't that expensive, so the bundle of Pi 3, noobs SD card, power supply and a coupe case went rapidly into my basket and through to checkout. Now I just hope I can pull the piano hat off the Pi 2 without breaking it, the connector is a very tight fit.