Raspberry Pi Development Board

Introduction:

Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized single computer board. It can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing, games and it can also play high definition video. It was developed by Raspberry Pi foundation from UK. The raspberry pi is ready for public consumption since 2012 with the idea of producing a cheep educational microcomputer for students and children. The raspberry pi is created to be something to encourage learning, innovation and experimentation. The raspberry pi computer is portable and less expensive.   Most of the raspberry boards are used to built raspberry pi projects, mobile phones and also used in solar street lights.  The start of 21^st century saw a huge growth in mobile computing technologies, a large segment of this being driven by the mobile phone industry.  The 98 percent mobile phones were using ARM technology. The ARM technology would later end up being featured on the raspberry pi with ARM processor core being used.

The system comes into two different models that is model A and model B. The main differences between these two are USB ports. The model A board which does not includes a Ethernet port and will consume less power. The model B that includes an Ethernet port and manufactured in China. The raspberry pi comes with set of open source technologies that is communication and multimedia of web technologies and ability to interact with microcontroller. It is portability of a mobile device.

Raspberry Pi Specifications:

Memory:

The raspberry pi comes equipped with 256 Mb of SDRAM in older version model A and 512 Mb on the newer versions model B. It is a small size PC compare with other PCs. The normal PCs RAM memory is available in gigabytes but in this type of application the RAM memory is more than 256 Mb or 512 Mb.

CPU:

The CPU is the main component of the raspberry pi. It is responsible for carrying out the instructions of a computer via mathematical and logical operations. The raspberry pi is a good company using the ARM11 series processor. It has joined the ranks of phone, Samsung galaxy.

GPU:

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized chip in raspberry pi. It is designed to speed up the manipulation of image calculations. The raspberry pi comes equipped with a Broadcom video core IV and it is supported for OpenGL.

Ethernet Port:

The raspberry pi Ethernet port is main gateway for communicating with other devices. You will able to use raspberry pi   Ethernet port to plug your home router to access the internet.

GPIO Pins:

The general purpose input and output pins on the raspberry pi are used to connect with the other electronic boards. The GPIO pins can accept input and output commands based on programmed raspberry pi.

The raspberry pi provides digital GPIO pins. These pins are used to connect other electronic components. For example you can connect it to the temperature sensor which transmitts digital data.

XBee Socket:

The raspberry pi proves two XBee socket for wireless communication purpose.

Power Source Connector:

The power source selector is a small switch it is located on side of the shield that can be used to enable an external power source.

UART:

The UART  are a serial input and output port. This can be used to transfer the serial data such as text and it is useful for transforming the debugging code.

Raspberry Development Board Model A:

The Raspberry Pi is a Broadcom BCM2835 system on chip board. The raspberry pi comes equipped with a 700 MHz, ARM1176JZF-S core CPU and 256 MB of SDRAM. The USB 2.0 ports use only your external data connectivity options. The raspberry pi draws its power from a micro USB adapter, with minimum range of 500 MA (2.5 watts). The graphics specialized chip is designed to speed up the manipulation of image calculations. This is equipped Broadcom video core IV cable and it is useful if you want to run game and video via your raspberry pi.

Features:

256 MB SDRAM memory

Broadcom BCM2835 SoC full HD multimedia processor

Dual Core Video Core IV Multimedia coprocessor

Single 2.0 USB connector

HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4) Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC) Video Out

3.5 MM Jack, HDMI Audio Out

SD, MMC, SDIO Card slot on board storage

Linux Operating system

8.6cm*5.4cm*1.5cm dimensions

Raspberry Development Board Model B:

The Raspberry Pi is a Broadcom BCM2835 system on chip board. The raspberry pi comes equipped with a 700 MHz, ARM1176JZF-S core CPU. The raspberry pi comes equipped with 512 MB of SDRAM. The USB 2.0 ports use only your external data connectivity options. The Ethernet is the raspberry pi main gate way to communicate with other devices and the internet in model B. The raspberry pi draws its power from a micro USB adapter, with minimum range of 500 MA (2.5 watts). The graphics specialized chip is designed to speed up the manipulation of image calculations. This is equipped Broadcom video core IV cable and it is useful if you want to run game and video via your raspberry pi.

Features:

512 MB SDRAM memory

Broadcom BCM2835 SoC full HD multimedia processor

Dual Core Video Core IV Multimedia coprocessor

Single 2.0 USB connector

HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4) Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC) Video Out

3.5 MM Jack, HDMI Audio Out

SD, MMC, SDIO Card slot on board storage

Linux Operating system

8.6cm*5.4cm*1.7cm dimensions

On board 10/100 Ethernet RJ45 jack

To Set Up and Start your Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi comes equipped with an SD card. This slot allows us to insert an SD card and use it as our devices. That is a main storage mechanism like a hard disk on a PC. The bootable operating system is loaded onto the card , you are planning to use. The raspberry pi is supported to Linux, ARM, Qtonpi, Mac operating systems. You can select one operating system; you will need to write it to an SD card using an application like Disk manager. You can also use other storage mechanism USB drive or USB external hard drive. There are variety of brands of SD cards on the market and different sizes. The raspberry pi supports maximum 64 GB SD card.

Before you can start your raspberry pi, you are going to need to connect display and keyboard, mouse like as computer. The Pi supports three different outputs composite video, HDMI video and DSI video, where the DSI video requires some specialized hardware.

Advantages:

• The raspberry pi has a small size of a credit card and it works as normal computer at low price.
• It is possible to work as a low cost server to handle web traffic.

Photo Credit:

• Raspberry Pi by raspberrypi <liwikimedia
• Raspberry PI Model B by wikimedia