Chapter 1 WHAT IS RASPBERRY PI In September 2017 a man in Denmark found a small foam box on the beach The box was filled with wires an antenna a tiny computer and a camera It was part of a weather balloon launched two months earlier by students in England A homemade weather balloon can take pictures and measure temperatures 20 miles 32 km above Earth
The green rectangle in this image is a Raspberry Pi It is connected to a circuit and LED lights The weather balloon's tiny computer was a Raspberry Pi This computer is only the size of a credit card but it can do just about everything a desktop or laptop computer can do The other difference between Raspberry Pi and a personal computer is that Raspberry Pi costs only about thirty dollars and you build it yourself Since Raspberry Pi first came out in 2012 people around the world have used them to make everything from video games to robots to weather stations
What's in a Computer When you think of a computer you probably think of something that has a screen and a keyboard But do you know what's inside a computer that makes it work A computer uses both hardware and software Hardware is all the parts of the computer that you can see and touch Software is the instructions that tell a computer how to complete tasks You might use a tablet a phone or a laptop every day All of these devices have hardware and software
THE MORE MEMORY A COMPUTER HAS THE MORE QUICKLY AND SMOOTHLY IT WILL RUN One of the most important pieces of hardware in a computer is the processor This is the computer's brain It follows instructions from the software Another important part is the RAM or random access memory RAM allows the computer to access and store information so it can work quickly Inside a computer these parts connect to a thin plate called a circuit board
