I’m sure that you have heard of Raspberry Pi at least once or twice. The Raspberry Pi is a low cost mini computer which has the size of a credit card. RPi comes in different versions; 2GB, 4GB or 8GB RAM. As mentioned it is cheap and the 2GB version only costs € 53.95 in the Raspberry Store. It’s actually a single board chip with all the necessary components which you would expect from a regular desktop; WiFi, HDMI, USB, UTP ports, micro-SD slot and USB C connection for power.
Since Raspberry Pi (RPi) comes without any storage, you need to use a micro-SD card. So basically if you would have a monitor, keyboard & mouse with a micro-SD card for the OS, you could use it as your daily driver computer. If that’s your goal, you could also go for the “Raspberry Pi 400” hardware kit which already includes everything you need, except the monitor! 😉
What if you want to do more with it?
The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic computer science for kids in schools and in developing countries. Due to it’s low costs, RPi nowadays is being used for wide range of digital maker projects all around the world to learn programming but also to create cool stuff. You could for example use it for DIY Ambilight for your TV, see here below video to get an idea, create your own NAS, run your own Retro games on it and many more projects.
Where do I use my RPi for?
I used my RPi2 for Kodi for streaming video’s and music but my RPi2 died a while ago. Since the latest RPi is 64bits, I decided to go for the latest model (4b) with 8GB of RAM and use this as my small Home Server. The goal was to run my own DHCP / DNS server, set-up my own PHP environment, since I want to learn PHP, but also to learn coding in Python and perhaps even more.
In the meantime I have already set-up my RPi 4b with Raspbian 64bit OS with some containers to make sure that I can play around with different apps without the risks that they “bite” each other, let’s say due to usage of the same library. So everything is safe in their own container using Docker.
While doing so I decided to start a series of blog posts about RPi and what I have installed on it. So expect to see more posts about RPi.
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