Raspberry Pi
Overview
Raspberry Pi (RPI) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs). It is widely used in many areas, such as for weather monitoring, because of its low cost, modularity, and open design. It is typically used by computer and electronic hobbyists, due to its adoption of HDMI and USB devices. There are three series of Raspberry Pi, and several generations of each have been released. Raspberry Pi SBCs feature a Broadcom system on a chip (SoC) with an integrated ARM-compatible central processing unit (CPU) and on-chip graphics processing unit (GPU).
Quoted from wikipedia
Listed boards
-
RPI4 board (specs) is powered by a Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz with 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM depending on model
-
RPI3B+ board (specs) is powered by a Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz with 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
-
RPI Zero W board (specs) is powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 ARM1176JZF-S 32-bit processor @ 1GHz with 512MB RAM
-
all these models have built-in Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces making connectivity to other devices and Internet very easy.
Operating system (OS)
The Raspberry Pi needs an operating system to work as it is considered as a full computer system. The OS is stored on an SD card that can then be inserted into the dedicated micro SD card slot of the Raspberry Pi. There are many OS available but the Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian) is somehow the official supported operating system.
Solution Lab: Several Raspberry Pi OS packages are made available to use the Raspberry Pi boards. These OS are burned on micro SD card that are ready to be plugged into the Raspberry Pi board of your choice. For instance the WaziGate distribution is available to start working with the Waziup IoT ecosystem.
After boot, see how to remotely accessing your Raspberry Pi. For WaziGate, see this tutorial.
Usage
Raspberry Pi boards are small single-board computers running a full Linux system that can be used in an incredibly large variety of embedded applications including high demanding audio/video applications. In the IoT domain, these boards are mainly used to build versatile IoT gateways. See for instance LowCostLoRaGw or WaziGate initiatives to build low-cost and versatile open IoT gateways with Raspberry Pi. See for instance this tutorial on how to build an outdoor IoT gateway.
The listed Raspberry Pi boards can be selected according to the level of memory and/or computing resource requirements:
- RPI4 board: IoT gateway running embedded and heavy AI processing tasks
- RPI3B+ board: versatile IoT gateway capable to run a large variety of embedded applications
- RPI0W board: lower cost, lower power IoT gateway capable to run light embedded applications
There are an incredible amount of peripherals, hats, screens, shields, etc, that can be attached to the Raspberry Pi through its GPIO header pins that expose various data buses pins such as I2C, SPI, etc. Here are some examples:
Links & Resources
- The official Raspberry Pi website
- Raspberry Pi documentations
- wikipedia page on Raspberry Pi boards
- Low-cost LoRa IoT framework with Raspberry Pi as versatile IoT gateway
- WaziGate IoT gateway
- 3694 Raspberry Pi Projects & Tutorials for Beginners and Up – www.hackster.io
- Projects using a Raspberry board – www.instructables.com
- Raspberry tutorials from Adafruit
- Raspberry tutorials from Instructables
- and much more tutorial materials and tutorial videos!
2021 - Congduc Pham