Raspberry Pi Basics: What the heck IS it?

Welcome! It's been a little while since I posted on here. I've been getting things together in my real life, but that's all straightening out, so time for tutorials!

Lets start with the Raspberry Pi!

Wait, did you say pie?!

Uh, no. I said "pi", as in the mathematical constant. The name "Raspberry Pi" is a play on words. But the actual Raspberry Pi is no joke, it's quite the awesome device.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny credit-card sized computer brought to us by the people at the Raspberry Pi foundation. It offers the ability to have a full fledged computer for less than $40. This little device has a ton of features,

• Composite video out (yellow circular plug for old tv's)
• HDMI out (for High Def tv's, also outputs sound through this port)
• 3.5mm audio out (headphone jack sized)
• SD card port
• 2 USB ports (rectangle ports, where you plug in keyboards and external hard drives)
• Ethernet port (where you plug the cable in for internet)
• 512MB of RAM (RAM is part of what makes a computer fast)
• GPIO pins (connectors to external parts, *I'll go into this later*)

On a side note, that's for the $35 Model B of the Raspberry Pi. There is a cheaper model A that only costs $25 but it has a few drawbacks.

• Only has 1 USB port
• Only has 256MB of RAM
• Has NO Ethernet Port

You can get both models of the Raspberry Pi from either RS Components, or Element 14. Depending on your current location on our big blue ball of a planet, I would personally suggest Element 14 if you're not in the UK, and RS Components if you are.

Device Benefits

But just being a small computer isn't the only draw to the Raspberry Pi. It's seriously cheap, so quite a few can be bought for the price of a full sized computer, and it will increase the availability of computers to more needy areas. The people at the Raspberry Pi foundation are also hoping to spread computer literacy and to teach more people and kids to program.

I'm willing to bet most of you didn't know what I was talking about when I said the Raspberry Pi had GPIO pins. Well, GPIO stands for General Purpose Input/Output. These little pins let you connect electronic parts, sensors, and motors! This way you can create programs that take control of or get data from these parts! You can make anything from an automated coffeemaker to Doctor Who props! (Or maybe even turn your stairs into a piano.)

All of the Programming!

This little device has serious potential. You have easy access to MANY languages, including (but not limited to)

• Python
• Html5/JS
• Ruby
• C/C++
• Scratch
• Java - only on certain distributions(versions) of Linux (The operating system the Raspberry Pi runs)

What is this "Linux" you speak of?

Well.. Linux is a operating system. If that doesn't make sense, think about this. You can buy a ton of different  brands of computers (Dell, HP, Asus, etc), but they all come with Windows. Windows is an OS (Operating System) too. If you own a Mac, your OS is called OSX, but all the updates have names like Mountain Lion.

Linux was made by Linus Torvalds. Linux's big push was that it was free and open source(you could literally edit the operating system and re-install it). Because of this many people have customized it a released it as a custom distro(short for distribution, its just a custom version of Linux).

But don't worry We'll be getting into all that in the next tutorial!

Next: Raspberry Pi Basics: Setting Up the SD card >>