As we, at Chitkara University Himachal Pradesh are gearing up to conduct a faculty development program on Raspberry Pi (July 25-26), I feel an urge to share some useful insight into this fascinating platform that can do everything your PC can do!

We are also setting up an embedded systems lab based on Raspberry Pi with support from world leading electronic distributor company Element14. The lab will have 10 Raspberry Pi boards to start with.

Introduction to Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a low cost, powerful open source community board (a credit card sized single board computer) that works on Linux Operating System. Raspbian being the standard operating system for Raspberry Pi (modified form of Debian Linux) along with some other operating systems like Fedora, OpenElec and a few multimedia OS. It is an ideal platform for a computer engineers to explore Computing, Programming, Mobile & Computer Architecture etc.

Raspberry Pi has numerous Peripherals, Sensors, GPIOs (General Purpose Input Output Pins), and Connectivity options that make it a popular choice among electronics engineers to build embedded systems, IoT applications etc. There is a long list of single board computer boards available in the market but there are three reasons that make Raspberry Pi so popular - 1) Low Cost, 2) Great Computing Power, 3) Fantastic Community Support from raspberrypi.org

Raspberry Pi - a credit card sized computer

Specifications of Raspberry Pi
Four models of Raspberry Pi that has hit the market so far - Raspberry Pi A, B, B+ and the latest one Raspberry Pi 2. I am sharing with you the key specifications of Raspberry Pi 2.

• Processor (Broadcom BCM2836 SoC) - Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU 1Ghz and a VideoCore IV dual-core GPU
• 4 USB Ports, 40GPIOs, HDMI Port, Ethernet Port, AV Port, Camera Interface etc.
• RAM - 1GB
• MicroSD Card Slot

How do You Get Started on Raspberry Pi?

• You will need following hardware accessories along with Raspberry Pi to get started - MicroSD card, Micro USB power adaptor, HDMI Cable, USB keyboard, USB Mouse and a display (which can be your PC monitor or LCD TV at your home)
• Download the operating system for free from raspberrypi.org and load it in your microSD card before inserting the card into your Pi.
• You will find lots of interesting project ideas on Raspberry Pi online to get started.
• If you get stuck anywhere then there is a very responsive online support community available at your disposal!
• Lastly, there are lots of useful, fancy, interesting hardware accessories available for Raspberry Pi for building variety of innovative applications.

Some Applications of Raspberry Pi

• It does everything that your computer can do - word processing, spreadsheets, gaming, internet browsing etc.
• Program with Raspberry Pi using inbuilt Python, Scratch, C Compiler
• You can do Kernel Programming, Explore Mobile Architecture.
• It has internet connectivity for applications like cloud computing, IoT etc
• HDMI interface & camera interface of multimedia applications & image processing.
• There are lots of embedded projects that you can build with it as it offers 40 GPIO pins for communicating with sensors & other interfaces and also offers various connectivity & communication protocols

My experience with Raspberry Pi
I have been working on Raspberry Pi for over a year now and thrilled by its capabilities. Currently a group of students are doing a project with me where they are using Raspberry Pi to build a game that will be controlled by hardware interfaces!

By Sagar Juneja, Research Associate, Chitkara University.

References
https://www.raspberrypi.org/