Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Model B

Raspberry Pi logo

The Raspberry Pi is an ultra-low-cost credit-card sized single board computer which was conceived with the primary goal of teaching computer programming to children. It has gained a popularity among hardware hackers. The latest version is the 3+, Model B

Hardware

The Raspberry Pi is based around the Broadcom BCM3825 SoC. This contains the ARM1176JZFS processor (floating point, running at 700Mhz), and a Videocore 4 GPU.

The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. Hardware accelerated playback of h.264 is currently limited to omxplayer and XBMC.

The Raspberry Pi has 8 dedicated GPIO pins, a UART, i2c bus, SPI bus with two chip selects, i2s audio, 3v3, 5v, and ground. I/O pins on the Raspberry Pi are limited to 3.3v and will be damaged by 5v signals, making it incompatible with most Arduino devices.

Video outputs supplied are HDMI and composite video. A DSI (Display Serial Interface, common in cellphones) connector is available, however a binary blob does not exist yet.

A 3.5mm audio jack or HDMI provides sound.

Applications

• Supercomputer
• Torrent Client, or usually we call it seedbox.
• Security
• Bitcoin Miner, on a industrial scale.
• Wolfram Language and Mathematica (free as in beer)

Hosting

• E-Mail Server
• Webserver, nginx or Apache
• TOR Relay
• YACY Search Engine
• Piratebox
• arkOS, Arch Linux-based operating system & self-hosting solution for Raspberry Pi
• OwnCloud

Communications

• Instant messaging-server, screen + finch
• Mumble VoIP server
• Piratebox router project
• Retroshare
• Smartphone

Audio

• FM Transmitter
• Police scanner
• Volumio
• Subsonic

Media

• Media Player
• PiCAST - Google Chromecast alternative

Gaming

• Retro gaming, with different apps, and hey, we can play Quake III here.
• Host your own MUD.
• Lakka.tv, the libretro SBC distribution, will let you emulate video game systems upto the 4th gen (snes, genesis) and a little 5th gen (psx) as of late 2016.

Variants

There are currently six Raspberry Pi models. Model A, Model B, Model A+, Model B+, Model Raspberry Pi 2 B+ and the newest one, Raspberry Pi Zero.

Model A has 1 USB port and lacks ethernet capability. 256MB RAM

Model B has 2 USB ports and a USB-based 10/100 ethernet port. 512MB RAM

The first production run of the Model B (Red PCB) is limited to 256MB RAM.

RPi Hub

See also

Single board computers