After a long wait the Raspberry Pi I ordered from Farnell on 29th February finally arrived yesterday.
I expect that most people reading this blog knows all about the Raspberry Pi and the charity behind it by now, designed with the aim to bring programming back into the school curriculum and spawn a new generation of coders, it’s had some fantastic news coverage and even people with no idea about computers have mentioned it to me over the last few months. It has been a rocky road, originally it was expected to have been released in late 2011 but finally the much anticipated single board computer has started to be delivered into the eager hands of geeks around the world. Initially only a caseless version of the “Model B” is available, intended for early adopters and developers with a fully cased version being launched for education later in the year. The idea being that by the time it reaches the hands of school children there will already be a healthy eco system built up around it and those preparing educational material will have been able to do so.
At the moment I am just familiarising myself with it and getting a grasp of what it is capable of. I’m running Debian Squeeze on it as that’s my distro of choice for servers and the like anyway and is also what the Raspberry Pi team are currently recommending. As a desktop it’s usable but pretty sluggish, perhaps not as much as expected but it’s potential for me lies more in the home automation and IoT field, £30 for a tiny networked Linux box is unbeatable and with up to 17 GPIO pins, built in UART and support for I2C and SPI it also opens up a lot of possibilities for interfacing to other hardware, a number of expansion boards are already available or in the pipeline. Here is a good primer on Getting Started with Raspberry Pi GPIO and Python.
