Abstract :
Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized
computer manufactured and designed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi foundation with the
intention of teaching basic computer science to school students and every other
person interested in computer hardware, programming and DIY-Do-it Yourself
projects.
The Raspberry Pi is manufactured in
three board configurations through licensed manufacturing deals with Newark element14 (Premier
Farnell), RS Components and Egoman. These companies sell the Raspberry Pi
online. Egoman produces a version for distribution solely in China and Taiwan,
which can be distinguished from other Pis by their red coloring and lack of FCC/CE marks.
The hardware is the same across all manufacturers.
The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835
system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor,
VideoCore IV GPU and was originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded (Model
B & Model B+) to 512 MB. It does not include a built-in hard disk or
solid-state drive, but it uses an SD card for booting and persistent storage,
with the Model B+ using a MicroSD.
The Foundation provides Debian and Arch
Linux ARM distributions for download. Tools are available for Python as the
main programming language, with support for BBC BASIC (via the RISC OS image or
the Brandy Basic clone for Linux), C, Java and Perl.
The Idea to create the Raspberry Pi
The idea behind a tiny and affordable
computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and
Alan 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 kids 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 kids were
interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: majority of
curriculums 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 Amigas,
BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier
generation learned to program on.
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