These are pre-assembled and are designed to be the same size as the Pi to make mounting easier. Pi HATs (Hardware Attached on Top) are specially designed bits of hardware which can be purchased and plugged straight into the GPIO pins. Suddenly the potential for real world ham radio applications seems endless! These devices can collect information and can be controlled by software (which you can install or even write) on the Pi. This is what gives us the physical interface between the Pi and the outside world, because it allows us to connect a very wide range of sensors/devices and breakout boards. Depending on the version of Pi you get they will have anything from 26-40 GPIO pins onboard. Now we get onto one of the main reasons the Raspberry Pi has been so widely adopted by hobbyists, the General Purpose Input Output Pins (GPIO). There is a distribution of Linux especially for the Pi called Raspbian and this comes with enough software to get you started. If you have ever used an Android or Amazon phone or tablet you have already used a ‘distribution’ of Linux, but you probably never realised! Instead it uses the Linux operating system, if you’re not amiliar with this, Linux is Open Source (free), runs 90% of the world’s fastest supercomputers and has a large community of developers and resulting software (all of which is again free). Almost a micro-Pi, very small, about the same power as the Pi 1, but super cheap and small!įirst thing you need to know is that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t use Microsoft Windows, this is for several reasons, not least due to cost.Raspberry Pi 1 (variants include: model A/B/B+).There have been several versions of the Raspberry Pi computer since initial launch, I’ve linked to the most recent versions below: The Raspberry Pi doesn’t use a traditional hard drive, instead it uses SD cards to store the Operating System and software, this is also a very cheap form of storage! Flavours of Pi In fact the Pi Zero is so cheap, it’s almost throw away (but that would be a shame!). This cheap price in part helps makes the Pi a compelling platform for hobbyists looking to experiment with. The Raspberry Pi (in its various forms) is a credit card sized computer which costs very little, from £4 for the Raspberry Pi Zero ( buy) to £30 for the top-spec Raspberry Pi 3 ( buy). You can download a PDF of the presentation here. This article is based around a presentation I gave to my local club ( CDARS – Chesham & District Amateur Radio Society). Hopefully this article will encourage you to get started with the Pi. The purpose of this article is to show you what can already be achieved and give you some ideas, rather than detail how to achieve each use! I’ve provided links against each use to help you take the next steps. It didn’t take long for the Amateur Radio community to see the potential in this little computer and sure enough we’re starting to see some really interesting uses coming to the fore. Indeed, initial demand was unprecedented and supplies were limited for some time after launch and this still continues after each new version is released. Originally conceived to get children into computer programming, it was quickly adopted by hobbyists due to its cheap price and GPIO output pins. The Raspberry Pi has proved to be a phenomenal hit with hobbyists around the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |