Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B build

Getting into to building a little something here. I love the idea that you can now get computers as small if not smaller than a credit card for next to nothing money wise.

The Raspberry Pi is a bare circuit board made in the United Kingdom for a very low price. There are many ways to use it, but the idea started as an inexpensive way to get kids to code and teach them about technology. The credit card sized computer comes with connections for a keyboard, mouse, monitor and power supply. It also has an HDMI, a composite video jack, a camera connector, and an Ethernet socket. All or some of those depend on the model. The hard drive is a SD card and/or a micro SD card depending on the model.

The Pi also has usb1 & usb2, and a few other ways you can use to connect other electronic projects. There are two main software applications associated with it, Python and Scratch. I can tell you right now I am very interested in Python.

Jeremy G Web Dev with Raspberry PiYou have a few different choices for operating systems. Out of the box a lot of people are going to grab a SD card with NOOBS on it. (New Out of the Box Operating System). This SD card gives you some choices for operating systems. The majority of these systems are Linux based with Raspbian Wheezy being the most popular out of the box. I see Windows 10 is now available as well.

If SD cards hold the operating system, can you card swap?

In theory I see myself doing some card swapping between different operating sytems for testing to see what I want to do in the long run. I am seeing some warnings about excessive swapping. Something about potential swapping being to robust for the cards connector. I see at first they where using full size SD cards. The Raspberry Pi 2 model b that I have uses a micro sd that connects and pushes in and out very easy. To me it does not look to be an issue. We will see.

Current Progress with my build

I have done almost nothing so far. I got a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B which is the quickest one at A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU with 1GB RAM. Like the (Pi 1) Model B+, it also has: 4 USB ports, 40 GPIO pins, Full HDMI port, Ethernet port, Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video, Camera interface (CSI), Display interface (DSI), Micro SD card slot, VideoCore IV 3D graphics core.

Out of the box pulled the SD card and cloned it on my Mac so I had a back-up if I screwed anything up. I hooked it up and installed Raspbian. Beyond that I have done almost nothing currently. Not sure what I really want to build here. I have a camera board and a security camera looks like an easy build. We will see.

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