Читать книгу Raspberry Pi User Guide - Eben Upton - Страница 5

This book explores a number of things you can do with your Raspberry Pi, from controlling hardware with Python, to using it as a media centre, setting up camera projects, or building games in Scratch. The beauty of the Raspberry Pi is that it’s just a very tiny general-purpose computer (which may be a little slower than you’re used to for some desktop applications, but much better at some other stuff than a regular PC), so you can do anything you could do on a regular computer with it. In addition, the Raspberry Pi has powerful multimedia and 3D graphics capabilities, so it has the potential to be used as a games platform, and we very much hope to see more people starting to write games for it.

We think physical computing – building systems using sensors, motors, lights, and microcontrollers – is something that gets overlooked in favour of pure software projects in a lot of instances, and it’s a shame, because physical computing is massive fun. To the extent that there was any children’s computing movement when we began this project, it was a physical computing movement. The LOGO turtles that represented physical computing when we were kids are now fighting robots, quadcopters, or parent-sensing bedroom doors, and we love it. However, the lack of General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) on home PCs is a real handicap for many people getting started with robotics projects. The Raspberry Pi exposes GPIO so you can get to work straight away.

I keep being surprised by ideas the community comes up with which wouldn’t have crossed my mind in a thousand years: the Australian school meteor-tracking project; the Boreatton Scouts in the UK and their robot, which is controlled via an electroencephalography headset (the world’s first robot controlled by Scouting brain waves); the family who are building a robot vacuum cleaner; Manuel, the talking Christmas moose. And I’m a real space cadet, so reading about the people sending Raspberry Pis into near-earth orbit on rockets and balloons gives me goosebumps.

In the first edition of this book, I said that success for us would be another 1,000 people every year taking up Computer Science at the university level in the UK. That would not only be beneficial for the country, the software and hardware industries, and the economy; but it would be even more beneficial for every one of those 1,000 people, who, I hope, discover that there’s a whole world of possibilities and a great deal of fun to be had out there. In the second edition and third editions, I was a little more ambitious, saying that we’d like to see that replicated throughout the developed world. As Raspberry Pi has grown, however, I’ve become even more ambitious: I want every child, everywhere, to have access to an open, programmable, general-purpose computer, and to have the opportunity to learn to program in the same way that I did on my BBC Microcomputer back in the 1980s. It’s a lofty goal, but we’ve already seen Raspberry Pi labs spring up in the most unlikely places, like a village lab in a part of Cameroon with no electricity network where the Pis run off solar power, generators, and batteries, or a school high in the mountains in Bhutan.

Building a robot when you’re a kid can take you to places you never imagined – I know because it happened to me!

– Eben Upton