WEEK 11
Activity: RESEARCH & FINDINGS (SOFTWARE)
HISTORY OF RASPBERRY PI
The Raspberry Pi was created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to inspire a new generation of children to become programmers.The idea behind a tiny and affordable computer came in 2006, when Eden Upton, rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Allan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A level students applying to read Computer science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the user applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.
Something had changed the way user were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonization of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amiga’s, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 62 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.
There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But they felt they could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming environment. From 2006 to 2008, they designed several versions of what has now become the Raspberry Pi.
By 2008, processor designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia, a feature they felt would make the board desirable to kids who wouldn’t initially be interested in a purely programming-oriented device. The project started to look very reasonable. Eden (now a chip architect at Broadcom), Rob, Jack and Alan, teamed up with Pete lamas, MD of hardware design and manufacture company Norco Technologies, and David Brazen, co- author of the seminal BBC Micro game Elite, to form the Raspberry Pi Model B entered mass production through licensed manufactured deals with element 14 and within two years it had sold over two million units.
RPi_General_History Pic
RASPBERRY PI SPECIFICATION
Table show below is the hardware specification Raspberry Pi for Model A and Model B. From table the difference between Model A and Model B is the size of memory (RAM) and power rating. For Model A the size of memory (RAM) is 256MB and power rating 2.5 watt (300mA). Model B comes with higher specification which is memory (RAM) is 512MB and power rating 3.5watt (700mA). The architecture processor used is RISC architecture which is an ARM 11 family. Both models can operate using listed OS, but in term of performance Model B is performance is much higher than Model A.
The picture above show the plan view of PCB board Raspberry Pi for Model B because has 2xUSB 2.0 port. This is another difference between Model A and B. Model A has 1xUSB 2.0 port. Another difference is the Model A doesn’t have an on-board Ethernet RJ45.
Raspberry Pi is a small, powerful and lightweight ARM based computer which can do many of the things a desktop PC can do such as word- processing, games or playing back High-Definition video. It was developed by The Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity, with the intention of providing low-cost computers and free software to students. Raspberry Pi is based on a Broadcom BCM2835 chip. Its small size also makes Raspberry Pi ideal for programming connected home devices—like the aforementioned print server, which has given us the power to make every computer, laptop, and cell phone in our network printer-compatible. It does not feature a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on a SD41.
The Raspberry Pi is a low cost single-board computer which is controlled by a modified version of Debian Linux optimized for the ARM architecture. The core of the home automation system is this mini - computer. This project using Raspberry Pi Model B. 700 MHz ARM processor with 512 MB RAM. To interface Raspberry Pi with the external world, we ca use WebIOPi. WebIOPi is a web application which allows to control Raspberry Pi’s GPIO.
