Raspberry Pi

The book I read to research this post was Raspberry Pi For Dummies by Sean McManus et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The Raspberry Pi which harkens back to the days when you bought a computer in kit form and had to assemble it is quite an exciting concept. I think in Britain it retails for £30 & for the money is really good value. In this is an example of someone who built a mainframe computer by connecting up 64 Raspberry Pi's and found a way of attaching them using lego blocks. A mainframe normally would cost millions of pounds and here is a way of building one for thousands or even hundreds. There are two versions of the Pi a version A with 256 MB of memory & 1 USB connector & a version B with 512 MB & 2 USB connectors. The 2nd version is the current one they make. It's the first dedicated linux computer and mostly uses a version called wheezy which you can download from the internet for free but must put on a compatible SD card that doubles as your storage on the Pi. There is also a compatible operating system called Raspberrybmc that turns your pi into a dedicated media centre with the right hardware of course that is an alternative to wheezy. The Pi uses Python for programming but there is also a visually based game design program you can download called scratch. There is a website at http://raspberry.mit.edu where you can download lots of applications for the Pi or submit your own. Being linux of course it's all open source or free. Many people build there own arcade machines using the Pi of which there are several projects in the book. Being linux you can also use software like libreoffice and gimp to do serious computing and you can connect a USB keyboard & a HDMI monitor among other things.