Raspberry Pi Introduction

Raspberry Pi is the name of a series of single-board computers made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity that aims to educate people in computing and create easier access to computing education.

The Raspberry Pi launched in 2012, and there have been several iterations and variations released since then. The original Pi had a single-core 700MHz CPU and just 256MB RAM, and the latest model has a quad-core 1.4GHz CPU with 1GB RAM. The main price point for Raspberry Pi has always been $35 and all models have been $35 or less, including the Pi Zero, which costs just $5.

All over the world, people use Raspberry Pis to learn programming skills, build hardware projects, do home automation, and even use them in industrial applications.

The Raspberry Pi is a very cheap computer that runs Linux, but it also provides a set of GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins that allow you to control electronic components for physical computing and explore the Internet of Things (IoT).

Is the Raspberry Pi open source?

The Raspberry Pi operates in the open source ecosystem: it runs Linux (a variety of distributions), and its main supported operating system, Raspbian, is open source and runs a suite of open source software. The Raspberry Pi Foundation contributes to the Linux kernel and various other open source projects as well as releasing much of its own software as open source.

The Raspberry Pi's schematics are released, but the board itself is not open hardware. The Raspberry Pi Foundation relies on income from the sale of Raspberry Pis to do its charitable work.

What can you do with a Raspberry Pi?

Some people buy a Raspberry Pi to learn to code, and people who can already code use the Pi to learn to code electronics for physical projects. The Raspberry Pi can open opportunities for you to create your own home automation projects, which is popular among people in the open source community because it puts you in control, rather than using a proprietary closed system.