Who wants pi The Raspberry Pi has made quite a splash since it was first announced. The credit-card sized computer is capable of many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. It can run several flavors of Linux and is being used to teach kids all over the world how to programhellip; Oh yeah, and it does all that for under $50.
The secret sauce that makes this computer so small and powerful is the Broadcom BCM2835, a System-on-Chip that contains an ARM1176JZFS with floating point, running at 700MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode and is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute. Whatrsquo;s that all mean It means that if you plug the Raspberry Pi into your HDTV, you could watch BluRay quality video, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.
But wait, therersquo;s more. The Model B also has a 10/100 Ethernet port so you can surf the web (or serve web pages) from right there on the Pi. The system volume lives on an SD card, so itrsquo;s easy to prepare, run and debug several different operating systems on the same hardware. Most Linux distributions for the Pi will happily live on a 2GB SD card but larger cards are supported.
The Model Brsquo;s two built-in USB ports provide enough connectivity for a mouse and keyboard, but if you want to add more you can use a USB hub. It is recommended that you use a powered hub so as not to overtax the on-board voltage regulator. Powering the Raspberry Pi is easy, just plug any USB power supply into the micro-USB port. Therersquo;s no power button so the Pi will begin to boot as soon as power is applied, to turn it off simply remove power.
On top of all that, the low-level peripherals on the Pi make it great for hardware hacking. The 0.1" spaced GPIO header on the Pi gives you access to 8 GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI as well as 3.3 and 5V sources. Mating ribbon cables can be found in the related products below.
Dimensions: 85.60mm x 56mm x 21mm
Features:
- Broadcom BCM2835 SoC
- 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S core CPU
- Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU
- 512 MB RAM
- 2 x USB2.0 Ports
- Video Out via Composite (PAL and NTSC), HDMI or Raw LCD (DSI)
- Audio Out via 3.5mm Jack or Audio over HDMI
- Storage: SD/MMC/SDIO
- 10/100 Ethernet (RJ45)
- Low-Level Peripherals:
- 8 x GPIO
- UART
- I2C bus
- SPI bus with two chip selects
- +3.3V
- +5V
- Ground
- Power Requirements: 5V @ 700 mA via MicroUSB or GPIO Header
- Supports Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, RISC OS and More!
Documents: