You used to get a floppy disk on the cover of a magazine with some software on it
and if you were really lucky you'd get a really old game that no one wanted to play free
on the cover of the magazine. Now you can walk into the shop and purchase a
magazine with a free computer on the front.
The Raspberry Pi was developed by the Raspberry Pi foundation as a sort of cheap general-purpose computer
that could be used to teach people how computers worked.
So the aim was to try & recreate the home computer boom that was around in the early
eighties and they took the naming convention from the BBC Micro
So they started with the model B and the model A and then just like the BBC micro went to
the model B plus we have here. They brought out the model B plus of the
Raspberry Pi. Quite nice, had a USB port, Ethernet port to connect to the network
HDMI-out so you could plug it into your telly and USB from a standard mobile phone charger.
So last Thursday on Twitter [I] saw, as I was getting up in the morning that they'd released a
new one, the Raspberry Pi Zero and the first thing that immediately hit you was the price...
$5. Less than the price of a movie ticket at the local cinema. And then I looked down a bit further on Twitter.
and I realize that they were giving them away on the cover of a magazine.
That's how small it is compared to the floppy disk.
[SR> What are we giving up to have such a cheap piece of kit?]
It's at least as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi you can clock it up to 1Ghz
it comes with 512 Meg of RAM. Its about equivalent to a typical desktop or
laptop machine in the mid 2000's in terms of CPU speed so what are we actually got here,
what have we got on it? Well we've got a microSD slot where we can put in
an operating system and I've burned one onto an SD card earlier so we should be able to boot it up
We've got mini HDMI-out to connect it to your TV so you need a
mini-HDMI to normal HDMI connector. We have a USB port so we can plug some peripherals in
and we have a power socket on a USB port and that's about it
the other thing we've got is a row of holes where we can solder in connectors to
access the GPIO port so we can connect it up to other things like I did last year with the Christmas tree
So let's connect it up and see what happens I've got an HDMI connector to this screen here
[SR> Is that a laptop we've got there? ]
No it's not a laptop this was developed by Motorola
for the Atrix line of mobile phones and the idea was that you dock your mobile phone in the
back and then be able to use it as if it was a little computer. Don't think it ever really took off
but they're great for connecting things together you've got HDMI input
and USB connections to the keyboard and mouse. You need a few converters to make it
all work but it's great for hacking with little things like Raspberry Pi's
So we've got an HDMI connected to it
to a mini HDMI socket and this is where things get a little awkward the USB
connector's a micro USB connector. The sort you'd normally use to charge your mobile phone
but it's being used on this to connect peripherals
so you need to get hold of a converter before you can use this.
You're gonna spend more than 4 quid [$5] you're gonna need to buy the converters unless you've already got them
I sort of fashioned my own out a bit of an old motherboard, the cable off my digital camera and some paperclips
But anyway, it seems to - it serves the purpose.
So we can connect up our, the keyboard and mouse built in to here.
There we are, that's connected up. Only thing that's left is to connect the power.
We should see it start to boot up and you'll see the flashing lights.
There we go, and then on the actual screen we can see Linux booting up
and I've already configured this, so [it] should in a minute boot me to the desktop
and we can start using it as a normal computer.
[SR> There's got to be a drawback, there's gotta to be something - I don't mean to be overly negative but..?]
So in terms of using it I mean
Once you've got it started, we're up & running the Raspbian environment you can use it like any
other Raspberry Pi. If you're a teacher you could get hold of one of these and for 4 quid [$5] give everyone in
your class their own computer to do some computer science stuff on it.
Relatively easy to setup. The instructions for setting up the SD cards are dead easy to set up and if they
destroy it, well at that price it's probably not much more expensive than the exercise
books they're writing in any way or the text books that they're working from so it's
effectively disposable I think.
[SR> So what sorts of things can we do with it then?]
Well it comes with some software built in, there're some programming environments
there's a C compiler in here as well as some Java stuff, Python, Scratch and so on...
The standard Raspberry Pi environment's all there.
The major feature that's missing, and I haven't mentioned it yet, is networking. By default there is no connection to the Internet on there
you can't plug into an ethernet there's no wifi so if you wanna take it online then
you'll need some sort of adapter so I'm using a USB to Ethernet adapter to
connect it to the network and so that works very well so if we run a web browser
hopefully that will start up in a second.
These machines, they're roughly about the power of the early 2000's but they're good fun to play with
[SR>So they might be slower than what you're used to day to day but...?]
Yeah, it's slower than your typical Mac or PC.
[SR> I suppose it'd be a bit churlish to say it's a bit slow considering it costs $5]
Well yeah, it depends what you need it for I mean it's fast enough to do some things but other
things you probably want something more powerful. I mean you can stick it behind
your TV and use it to watch movies if you put a wifi dongle on it and stream video to it.
[SR> So what's this, is this coming up with YouTube is it? ]
Yep, 's coming up with YouTube. I think the reason it's slow is I have a very dodgy...
...adapter here which doesn't seem to work, the keyboard keeps
cutting out as well so don't take this as a view of the speed
So yeah, you are going to have to buy some adapters and if you haven't got a keyboard or a monitor you need one of them
but it is a fully functional machine & if you want to learn how to program
or perhaps learn how to do hardware hacking; you've got the GPIO pins here
which you can solder on some adapters and then you can connect it up to devices like I did the
Christmas tree last year you could create one using this and you could hide
this in the box of the Christmas tree quite easily.
You can get a case for this in fact that's how I actually first saw it was released - I saw the tweet about the case rather than the
actual device, so there are cases available. Probably cost more than the actual device
[SR> Great! so I might go and get myself one!]
Ah you'll be lucky, they're all sold out!
[SR> They've all gone?]
Yes, yes
It seems it was very, very popular. Seem to have sold out of all the ones they've made
I'm sure they'll be making more & they'll be available again soon
and it's very very difficult for people who go into a bad place and use a card
because if if you complain to your bank then the strip club owner will just say.....