Raspberry Pi Initial Impressions

An interesting little story: one day last week I received an email in my school inbox from DHL. I stopped for a moment, wondered why I would be receiving an email from DHL, why it was coming to my school address, and then went ahead and took a look at what it was all about. Upon opening the email I noticed that it was a shipping notice from RS Components and at that point I realized what it was all about: my Raspberry Pi finally shipped.

For anyone who may be unaware, the Raspberry Pi is a very small (the length and width dimensions are roughly the size of a credit card) barebones computer which was designed with the intent of creating a very inexpensive piece of equipment for learning programming. This is what the Raspberry Pi comes with (all of which of are not removable components, unless you want to remove solder): a circuit board with an integrated ARM processor, GPU, and RAM, some input and output jacks, a few LEDs, a jack for a power supply, a few connectors that I have yet to identify, and, depending on the model, an Ethernet port. The Raspberry Pi's assorted jacks and ports all follow fairly established standards. It is because of these standards that I was able to get it up and running just by plugging in other components that I had on hand.

· Audio and Video: HDMI, and more traditional RCA/composite/headphone jack A/V options

· Power: micro USB, the kind found typically found on cell phones (the challenge in regards to power was finding a wall adapter that output the proper power specification, 700 - 1200 mA in my case.)

· Secondary storage: standard SD card slot

· General input and output: two regular USB (presumably 2.0) ports to connect a keyboard and mouse to (and likely any number of other devices.)

· The only other requirement that I had to handle to get the device up and running was to configure an SD card with an appropriate operating system that it could boot into.

In my specific case I made use of what I had on hand and byte-wise copying the operating system image to an SD card to get my Raspberry Pi up and running. Fortunately, for anyone with more sense than me, you can also order a few additional components to go along with the Raspberry Pi. One of the most useful items may just be the SD card that comes with a version of Debian Linux pre-written/installed and ready to go.

I would like to take a good look at what the Raspberry Pi can do. There are currently three variations of Linux available for download (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads) specifically for the Raspberry Pi and I have to admit that my experience with the Debian version, despite my previous fondness for Debian on desktop, has left me very disappointed. The GUI that comes with this install of Debian appears to tax the hardware components of the Raspberry Pi a little too much for my personal tastes. I enjoy speedy and responsive equipment, loading a web page in Midori was painfully slow. Fortunately the GUI is strictly optional and must be started from a command line interface, the default interface upon booting. In regards to the idea of using a Raspberry Pi for programming education, the Nano text editor, a command prompt, and a compiler are more than enough to get started. It is also fortunate that I have a couple more variations of Linux to try out to see if either of them are more suited to what I want to get out of it.

The Raspberry Pi is an interesting device and the creation of a $25 - $35 educational tool is a very interesting concept. The Raspberry Pi gives a student access to barebones components that are fairly well standardized and accessible, and I could see the Raspberry Pi being a useful piece of hardware for learning how to create your own operating system. In my past experiences I think that I may have preferred to learn how to write assembly code for a device such as the Raspberry Pi instead of a virtual machine. Going forward, I definitely have a few things that I would like to try out with the Raspberry Pi. The unit is supposed to be able to handle video fairly well (the GPU is supposed to be able process 1080p) and I would like to attempt to use it as a streaming media client to test that functionality. I also have an interest in attempting to use it as a portable web server. Why? I really don't know, I just do. Otherwise, the Raspberry Pi foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) is sharing news of what users have managed to use the Raspberry Pi for, including playing a xylophone (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1471).

side view with HDMI port

side view with Ethernet and USB ports

side view with RCA composite video and 3.5mm audio ports

side view with micro USB port for power source

bottom view with SD card