Raspberry Pi, the company that aims to bring us an extremely affordable, delightfully capable, very flexible ARM GNU/Linux based machines that pretty much anyone can use, have released a new version of their product. The company is based in the UK and manufactures the devices at a Sony plant in the UK. Since the company started, they have released several iterations of Raspberry Pi and today, they released a new one: the Raspberry Pi A+.
The Raspberry Pi B+ was already cheap; you could buy it for around $25-30. The A+, though, will be available for $20, and that’s a bargain. You get a 40 pin GPIO (General purpose in/out connector) so that you can attach other components, some made by Raspberry Pi itself, you also get a Micro SD card reader which has been upgraded to a push-push (easier ejection), as well as an audio/video output. This new model is also smaller and thinner than the previous version, if the previous iterations were just too big and hefty for you. You will get 256 MB of RAM (a slight downgrade from the 512 of the B+) as well as a 700MHz Broadcom CPU, a USB 2.0 port, HDMI and support for touch display – a really nice feature on the Raspberry Pi. The A+ does not have an Ethernet port like its big brother, so you will need to use a Wi-Fi dongle.
Here’s a video Raspberry Pi posted giving us a tour of the mini computer.
The Raspberry Pi makes computing very accessible to all ranges of people from students in elementary school to the guys and gals who just love to tinker with computers. Here is a website that tells you 21 cool things you can do with a Raspberry Pi, but the list doesn’t stop there. Some of my favorites are creating a Penguin monitoring station, the Christmas light controller, a device to help brew your beer, and a Super Mario machine. Of course, the Raspberry Pi can perform more mundane tasks too, like power a family calendar, or a recipe storage device in the kitchen, and now at an even better price.
Do you own a Raspberry Pi? What do you do with it? If you had one, what would you do with it? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
[button link=”http://www.raspberrpi.org/blog/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Raspberry Pi[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
