Assalamualaikum,
Back in November 2015, Raspberry has announced Raspberry Pi Zero which cost around $5. I was waiting for any news when Raspberry Pi Zero will come to Malaysia but couldn’t find any. I did ask people from RS and they also couldn’t confirm when Raspberry Pi Zero will arrived in Malaysia. By the way, you can make an online purchase of Raspberry Pi from RS or Element14. As I couldn’t wait any longer to own a Raspberry Pi (which a lot of people start to talk about this hand palm size computer), I ordered my Raspberry Pi 2 Model B on 7th January 2016 and it safely arrived in my hand on 13th January 2016.
Here is a picture of my Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.
Below is the technical specification:
- 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
- 1GB RAM
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- Full HDMI port
- Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- Camera interface (CSI)
- Display interface (DSI)
- Micro SD card slot
- VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
There is a lot of fun things that you can do with this small computer! Just google it up and you can find a lot of ideas. What interest me in this small computer is the GPIO. So what does GPIO means? GPIO is stand for General Purpose Input/Output where it is a generic pin on an integrated circuit. This GPIO is programmable and you can do a lot of IoT (Internet Of Things) projects! This generic pin does not have any predefined purpose, hence you can use the pin to connect to anything!
With my background in Electrical Engineering, I learned a lot about microcontroller programming and any other related staff. Previously, I was playing around with PIC which is a Microchip product. The main different thing about programming a PIC and Raspberry Pi is where does the program is stored. For PIC, I need to “burn” the data inside the PIC and there is a very limited size of space. However for Raspberry Pi, the program will be saved in the microSD card which you can expand it later on. In fact, if the storage is not enough, you can use the USB interface to add mass storage to add more capacity.
Every parents always wanted the best for their children. I am as well! This idea came few years back when I was expecting my first baby. Put aside the nervous feeling, I sat down and think what I can help to train my kids brain when they growing up? ROBOTIC! Back in University day, I was grateful that I joined Robotic Club and I did learn a lot about building up a functional robot. There is a lot of people out there who build up a kit to teach Robotic to their kids. From my point of view, this is a very good initiative by the parents. The main idea is not to train them to become a programmer but to train their brains with logic. This is the main reason why I started back to learn this despite of my current work in Networking field.
InshaALLAH, wish me best of luck. I really hope that I will succeed in this beautiful journey as a father.
Ameer.