Читать книгу Raspberry Pi For Dummies - McManus Sean, Evans Jonathan, Sean McManus - Страница 13

This model is a circuit board with components and sockets stuck on it, as shown in Figure 1-2. In an age when most computing devices are sleek and shiny boxes, the spiky Pi, with tiny codes printed in white all over it, seems alien. That’s a big part of its appeal, though: Many of the cases you can buy for the Raspberry Pi are transparent because people love the look of it.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the latest Raspberry Pi board. It features the following:

 Up to 8GB of memory

 Four USB ports (two USB 2 ports and two higher-speed USB 3 ports)

 Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and a Gigabit Ethernet port for a wired Internet or network connection

 A headphones-style audio-out socket

 40 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, which you can use to connect your own electronics projects or specially designed add-ons (see Chapter 21)FIGURE 1-2: The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (center), Model A+ (top right), and Pi Zero W (top left).

 Support for two monitors at resolutions of up to 4K

 Compatibility with the Raspberry Pi Camera Module

 Power over Ethernet (PoE) support when used with the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT, which enables you to use your Ethernet cable for both networking and powering your Pi

Like previous Pi models, the Raspberry Pi 4 is about the size of a deck of cards. As with any current Raspberry Pi, it uses a microSD card for storage. Its price is around $35 for 2GB of memory or $75 for 8GB of memory.

The Raspberry Pi Desktop Kit is also available, which includes the accessories you’ll need, except for the monitor.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is our recommendation for the most powerful budget-friendly Raspberry Pi. You may be able to use it with your own keyboard and mouse to save money. The GPIO pins are great for electronics projects.

It’s called the Model B, incidentally, as a tribute to the BBC Microcomputer that was popular in the UK in the 1980s. It’s sobering to think that the BBC Micro cost about ten times the price of a Raspberry Pi, which, thanks to 40 years of progress in computer science, has more than 15,600 times more memory.