Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Features of a Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi model B. This was followed by the Raspberry Pi model A. In 2014, the Raspberry
Pi foundaion released variants B+ and A+. The Raspberry Pi models A and A+ (cosing 25
USD and 20 USD respecively) do not come with an Ethernet port, a USB port and 256 MB
RAM. The model A+ replaced model A while the model B+ replaced model B. The model B
(price: 35 USD) came with an Ethernet port, 2 USB ports, and 512 MB RAM; model B+, which
supersedes model B, comes with 40 pin GPIO header as opposed to 26 in the earlier models,
and has 4 USB ports and a micro SD card slot instead of the SD slot. Per the Raspberry Pi
Foundaion website, model B+ (as well as model A+) consumes lower power, has beter
audio and a beter form factor, which we certainly concur with. The model A+ also comes
with a 40 pin GPIO header and a micro SD card slot. The models A+ and B+ have nine more
GPIO pins than their predecessors.
The Raspberry Pi 2 was released ater we inished wriing the topic. Please refer
to the topic's site to ind out more about geing started with model 2.
The objecive of this topic is to build cool projects using the Raspberry Pi. We will discuss the
components of Raspberry Pi from this perspecive. If you are interested in inding out more
about the Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundaion's webpage has published the technical
speciicaions of all the components.
First, we will discuss the components available on the Raspberry Pi and the use of these
components in our projects. The components of the Raspberry Pi include:
F
2 USB ports (1 USB port available in model A)
F
Ethernet port (available only in models B and B+)
F
RCA output
F
HDMI output
F
Audio output
F
Low level peripherals, which include:
GPIO
(
General Purpose Input Output
)
UART/Serial Port
(
Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter
)
I2C
(
two wire interface
)
SPI
(
Serial Peripheral Interface
)
