A New Data Toy — Unboxing the Raspberry Pi

Last week I received two Raspberry Pis in the mail from AdaFruit and just now have some time to play with them. The Raspberry Pi is a minimal computer system that is about the size of a credit card. In the embedded systems community, the excitement is for obvious reasons, but I strongly believe that such a device can help collect and use data to help us make better decisions because not only is it a computer, but it is small and portable.

For development, Raspberry Pi can connect to a television (or other display) via HDMI or composite video (the “yellow” plug for those still stuck in the 1900s haha). A keyboard, mouse and other devices can be connected via two USB ports. A powered hub can provide support for even more devices. There are also various pins for connecting to a breadboard for analyzing analog signals, for a camera or for an external (or touchscreen) display. An SD Card essentially serves as the hard disk and probably a portion of the RAM. The more recent Model B ships with 256MB RAM. Raspberry Pi began shipping in February 2012 and these little guys have been very difficult to get […]