ABSTRACT
The inexpensive and immensely popular Raspberry Pi microcomputer (Fig. 18.1) can be a very cost-effective platform for developing a huge variety of electronic projects that need programmed control. With its impressively small form factor of just 86 × 56 mm, the Raspberry Pi utilizes a Broadcom ARM-based SoC (system on chip) processor running at a default speed of 700 MHz. An integral Videocore 4 video-processing unit caters for hardware decoding of high-definition video at high bit rates and this makes the unit ideal for a wide variety of multimedia applications as well as embedded projects. Although both models have the same processor hardware, Model B does benefit from an increased 512 Mb of RAM compared with the 256 Mb fitted to the Model A. The newly introduced Model B+ (shown in Fig. 18.1) offers an enhanced specification with four USB ports (compared with two on the Model B), lower power consumption, improved audio quality and a 40-pin I/O connector which retains pin-out compatibility with the first 26 pins on the Model B.
