Raspberry Pi: It's not for eating

Yes, as the title suggests, tongue in cheek, it is Pi, not Pie.  Therefore, not for human digestion, but certainly for human consumption.

In many ways, it is unfair to compare Raspberry Pi to Arduino.  Yet, the general public will likely make this comparison, being unaware of the fundamental difference, even just from a product development perspective.

As stated on the Raspberry Pi wikipedia description, "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."  In other words, unlike the Arduino which is intended to be a programmable, electronic development platform, the Raspberry Pi was intended and developed to be a base computer board, albeit shy in performance, specifically so that it can be low in price or cost to produce and obtain.

Like an Arduino, a person could build their own Raspberry Pi, but the difficulty level and cost to make a "one off" board would likely be prohibitive.  The ARM and SOC portions are proprietary.

The features and capability of a Raspberry Pi though, are quite rich.

As noted, a Raspberry Pi IS a computer.  It has all the necessary ports and adding appropriate memory, a power supply, and I/O hardware is all it takes to have a fully functional computer.

As shown in the following Make video, while it is mostly painless to get your Raspberry Pi up and running, there are a few things to do, so you need to be ok with getting your hands a bit "dirty":

So, that's all well and good.  If we stop at this context of a Raspberry Pi, we basically have a cheap, though slightly underpowered computer.

What's the point?

Here's the reality.  At as little as $40 for the board (yes, this is less one or two necessary components), you have a full computer.  Add the memory card and the Rasperian OS and now we're talking about $60 for a headless computer.  Plug it into your television and you can have yourself a full blown, internet connected media server.  Or add an external hard drive or NAS, and you have a fully functional file / storage / backup server which could be placed on the internet as a "cloud" server for your remote access pleasure.

Then, there are many projects on integrating this board into other projects like a kiosk or a DIY CNC machine and even use it in conjunction with an Arduino.

In future, we will be bringing to our readers a bi-weekly Raspberry Pi project article, in alternating weeks of our Arduino project articles.

There are some very interesting projects that people are using their Pi's for, and perhaps a project might suit your interest or need, or it might simply spur your imagination on what you might do with your (one or many) Raspberry Pi(s).