Chapter 1. Meet Raspberry Pi
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to
- Set up your Raspberry Pi
- Install an operating system—Raspbian—on your Pi
- Find and open applications
- Write your first bit of code in Python
What kinds of things do you think you can do with a Raspberry Pi?
1. Play games.
2. Watch videos.
3. Create a video game.
4. Listen to music.
5. Make a sound mixer for a dance party.
6. Build a robot.
Believe it or not, these are all projects you can do yourself, and if you learn to program in Python, the sky is the limit. You can achieve quite a lot on your Pi, as long as you can write a program to do it. But before we talk about that, let’s take a look at a Raspberry Pi and discover what makes it tick.
The Raspberry Pi, sometimes referred to as the Pi, is a small, low-cost computer invented in the U.K. by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It provides an easy-to-use tool to help you learn to code in Python (the Pi part of its name came from the focus on using it to code in Python).
About the size of a deck of cards, it isn’t as powerful as a laptop or desktop computer; its computing power is more similar to that of a smart phone. But what it lacks in processing power, it makes up for in its many features:
- Its readiness for programming in Python
- The many ways you can use it
- Its small size and cost