Dear friends welcome back. In this video we
take a first look at the popular
Raspberry Pi board and then we learn how
to boot it. Let's start. The Raspberry Pi
is an impressive platform. The model I have in front of me
is Raspberry Pi A+ model which was sent
to me by GearBest.com.
I chose the model A+ instead of the more powerful ones
because this board is ideal for embedded projects
that require low power consumption. Let's
see what this board has to offer.
The Raspberry Pi model A+ is very small
in size. It has the same size as the
Arduino Uno but don't be fooled by its
small size. This board is extremely
powerful. It has the same computational
power of a laptop that you could buy
10 years ago. It uses a 700mHz  32 bit processor. It has
256 megabytes of RAM memory.
It runs Linux as an operating system and all that with a price tag of $30. It is really impressive.
The board also has a full size HDMI slot
a Display Port, this one here
a camera port,
an integrated audio and video jack
40 GPIO pins and a usb 2.0 port.
Also, in the front we can find a micro-usb connector
in order to provide power to the Raspberry Pi A+.
The power consumption of this board can be as low as only 1W.
That ultra low power consumption makes this
board ideal for battery-powered
embedded projects that require huge
processing power. The board on the back
has only one micro-SD card. Now let's see how to boot this device for the first time.
In order to boot the device we need a micro-SD card
with a capacity of at least 4 GBs.
We then have to copy a Linux distribution in the card.
Let's go to the computer in order to do it.
In order to download the Linux distribution that we need,
we go to the official Raspberry Pi website.
We then go to downloads and we download the NOOBS offline install file.
We download it and we save it.
It is a big file and it will take us about 10-20 minutes to download. Let's wait.
When the download is complete we unzip the file inside the SD card module.
The extraction will take some time. Now that
the extraction is complete we can remove
the SD card from the computer and insert it in the Raspberry Pi.
Now we are ready to connect the Raspberry Pi to a
television or a monitor.
Let's do it.
First, i connect a usb hub to Raspberry Pi, in order to have more USB ports available,
in order to connect wi-fi, keyboard and mouse. I have
powered on the board using a standard
cell phone charger. The input voltage of the Raspberry Pi is 5V.
Any 5V adapter that can provide 500 mA would do.
At first, the device asks us what we want to install.
We select the Raspbian distribution and we press OK.
My wireless mouse and keyboard were
recognized at once.
Impressive! After 10-15 minutes the
installation is complete. Now we have the
option to either boot with a graphical
interface or with a command-line.
I choose the graphical interface and i reboot. After a couple of minutes, the graphical interface is loaded.
As you can see, it is a fully capable small
computer.
It recognized my external wi-fi dongle at once, so i can browse through the internet.
I can play games such as
minecraft or program using Scratch or
other software. I have to say that I am
truly impressed. This thing is so easy.
As i mentioned earlier, there are more powerful Raspberry Pi models out there
such as the Raspberry Pi 2, which you can use as a small computer.
The A+ model we use today is kind of slow to act as a computer
but it is great for embedded projects.
The power consumption of the board is just over 1W when we are connected to the Internet via wi-fi
and we use a keyboard and a mouse but it is reduced
to less than 1W if we don't use any of these peripherals.
The power consumption is very low for such a capable device and as you can see
I am now powering it from a small power bank using 4 AA batteries.
The batteries have a capacity of 2,500 mAh
so the Raspberry Pi can stay on for around 12 hours.
As we saw, the Raspberry Pi is an impressive little device!
With it we can build more advanced projects than the ones we were building so far, so stay tuned.
If you want to buy this board please
consider doing it from GearBest.com
which was kind enough to send me a sample unit in order to build projects with it for our channel.
GearBest.com also offers a coupon
code to all the viewers of our channel
so you can get the Raspberry Pi A+ for
only $25, free shipping.
Just enter this code at checkout. You can find a link for the board in the description of the video.
If this is your first time here, i would love to have you subscribed.
In this channel i post DIY hardware and software projects every Saturday.
I hope that you liked this video and I will see you next week.
