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 versions are the 4, model B; and the closely related 400, which is slightly faster.

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

• Pi-hole server to block ads, tracking, and adult content across your entire network
• Supercomputer
• Torrent Client, or usually we call it seedbox.
• Security
• Bitcoin Miner, on a industrial scale.
• Wolfram Language and Mathematica (free as in beer)

3D Printing

• OctoPrint (OctoPi) server to control a 3D printer

Smart Home

• Mycroft Smart Home (replacement for shit like Google Home or Alexa)

Hosting

• E-Mail Server
• Webserver, nginx or Apache
• Tor Relay
• YACY Search Engine (Dead project)
• 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
• Retro phone
• radio amateur stations, requires license and filtering
  • Radio Berry amateur ("ham") radio cape
  • rpitx a general radio frequency transmitter

Audio

• FM Transmitter
• Police scanner
• Volumio
• Subsonic

Media

• Media Player
• PiCAST - Google Chromecast alternative
• KODI Full-Featured Media Player

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.
• ArchiSteamFarm

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

Buying

The supply chain crisis has been made worse by scalpers, so these are hard to get, and often expensive. Roughly half the volume used to go to the professional market, and this is now been given priority during the shortages. The reason for the popularity with the professionals, is that the producer has promised to keep supplying older boards for many years, and they have been true to their words. Such long term support normally comes with a huge premium that they do not charge.

Nevertheless, some cheap boards can be found using the continuously updated PRi Locator.

See also

• Single board computers
• Home server