The Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, low-power single board computer the size of a credit card. With a low price point and advanced software, it is a great tool to teach youth electronics and programming.
The Pi is developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Their goal is ''to advance the education of adults and children, particularly in the field of computers, computer science and related subjects,'' according to their about us page.
Children buy $60 video games for expensive consoles each year. What if they purchased a computer with that money instead? They could take the same HDMI cable out of their video game system and plug it into a Raspberry Pi.
Breakdown of various available models of the Raspberry Pi
| Release Date | Original Price | Model | GPIO Pins | CPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 2016 | $35 | 3 B | 40 | 1.2GHz ARMv8 64bit (quad core) |
| Nov 2015 | $5 | Zero | 40 | 1.0GHz ARMv6 (single core) |
| Feb 2015 | $35 | 2 B | 40 | 900MHz ARMv7 (quad core) |
| Nov 2014 | $20 | 1 A+ | 40 | 700MHz ARMv6 (single core) |
| July 2014 | $25 | 1 B+ | 40 | 700MHz ARMv6 (single core) |
| Apr 2014 | $30 | Compute | 200 | 700MHz ARMv6 (single core) |
| Feb 2012 | $25 | 1 A | 26 | 700MHz ARMv6 (single core) |
| Feb 2012 | $35 | 1 B | 26 | 700MHz ARMv6 (single core) |
There are other SBCs (Single Board Computers) available. The Raspberry Pi is not the best, but the Raspberry Pi is one of the cheapest and most popular boards. Other SBCs include OEMA68, Parallella with 18 core processors, OLinuXino, Banana Pi, C.H.I.P. the $9 base modular computer, Beagleboards, and Cubieboards. With anything popular in the open source community, higher numbers of people working on a projects yields more projects, tutorials, and development. I started with the journey into single board computers with the Raspberry Pi model 1 B.
Electricity efficiency: A typical desktop computer without a monitor consumes 200 W 800 mA. If you were to leave a full computer running all day for a year, you would be using 1752 kilowatt-hours or about $630 on your electric bill. A 5 W Raspberry Pi running all day for a year would use 43.8 kilowatt-hours or about $15. This makes a large environmental difference for long-term projects like hosting a web server or opening your garage when your phone comes within range.