Let's get started

The Raspberry Pi, or just Pi as it's called by project designers, is a complete computer system on a small motherboard. In this chapter, you will learn to manage and use the computer with a simple black box methodology. With this simple methodology you don't need to understand the architecture or the internal working of a computer, but you will need to know how it responds to various input and output methods.

At the top level is user input and output. We will use the Raspbian graphical desktop interface as much as possible to simplify interactions with the computer. At the hardware level, you will need to understand the connectors and their purpose. You need not understand the internal architecture of your Pi to complete a project.

There are various models of the Raspberry Pi, which range from one with 256 MB memory with a single-core ARM CPU through to the latest with 1 GB memory and a quad-core ARM CPU. For all of the projects in this book, you can use any of the Raspberry Pi models (they all run the same Raspbian release) with only a slight difference in the I/O connectors to contend with.

We will ignore the internal Raspberry Pi configuration in this book unless it is required to complete a project. So, you won't need to know the CPU type or memory architecture, but you will need to understand the ports (connections) on the board. We've listed the input and output ports available for the Raspberry Pi A+, Raspberry Pi B+, and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B models:

Of course, like all computer systems where operation at the desktop level is programmed to be user friendly, once you peer beneath the surface of Pi at both the software and hardware level, it can get complicated.

To ensure that you have the best experience, please read through all of this chapter until you are ready to build and boot Raspbian for the first time and before you start to build your Pi development system.

After completing this chapter, you will be able to: