3.1 Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools.

The Raspberry Pi is manufactured through licensed manufacturing deals with Newark element14 (Premier Farnell), RS Components and Egoman. All of these companies sell the Raspberry Pi online. Egoman produces a version for distribution solely in China and Taiwan, which can be distinguished from other Pis by their red coloring and lack of FCC/CE marks. The hardware is the same across all manufacturers.

The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC) which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (The firmware includes a number of "Turbo" modes so that the user can attempt overclocking, up to 1 GHz, without affecting the warranty), Video Core IV GPU, and was originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded to 512 MB. It does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, but uses an SD card for booting and long-term storage.

Tools are available for Python) as the main programming language, with support for BBC BASIC (via the RISC OS image or the "Brandy Basic" clone for Linux), C),and Perl.

Figure 9: Raspberry Pi Model B