[Coco] Raspberry Pi

[John Kent]

Yep... $38 Raspberry Pi needs a $25 HDMI / converter cable for the 
monitor, a $14 USB keyboard, USB mouse, powered USB hub if you want to 
use other devices and not all USB hubs will work with it, and it only 
has 2 USB ports for keyboard and mouse, SD card which you can flash with 
Debian Wheezy using a windows PC and some special software you can 
download. So a $25 computer ends up costing a lot more than $25 once you 
buy all the extras needed to make it work. Those were Australian prices. 
It might be a bit cheaper in the US.

You end up though with a pretty good little computer. The CPU runs at 
700MHz I think and doesn't have any heat sink. It requires a 1-1.5A 5V 
power pack so it's only using 5 - 7.5 W. I think a desktop CPU uses 
about 65W - 100W depending on the CPU. The CPU has a Floating Point 
Unit, I think, and a GPU for the display. It will run with a 1920 x 1080 
HD screen.

You max out the processor loading a web page, but it works. It uses 
Midori as the web browser. The model A I bought had 256MB of RAM but the 
new model B which came out not long after has 512MB of RAM. Not a lot of 
RAM but enough to run Linux and a web browser.

There is a header with I think a UART interface, SPI, and maybe I2C and 
a few I/O pins. You can hook up some 74HC595 (?) chips to do SPI I/O 
although the ARM CPU operates at 3.3V and the TTL/HC chips usually run 
at 5V. You might be able to write to the SPI interface via a device driver.

Aaron appears to have posted a pretty good description of it.



On 07/17/2013 03:52 AM, Bill wrote:
> Nope, I don't, so I guess there will be a good bit of money needed.
>
> Thanks
> Bill
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
> Behalf Of Sean
> Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 1:26 PM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Raspberry Pi
>
> I have one that I play around with, very impressive for such a small device.
>
> You will need a way to power it via USB (I use a powered USB hub), a USB
> keyboard and mouse, composite or HDMI video cable, and an SD card to put
> the boot image on.  If you have all these things handy already, then you
> just need the Pi itself.
>
>
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