Botland loves Raspberry Pi. As great fans go, we’ll try to be objective as much as possible. Today, we’re dissecting the myths and indescribable sentiments that are floating around about the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s products and ideas.
Raspberry Pi – more than just a computer
Today there will be several heroes from the Raspberry Pi family and various heroes will also be mentioned. Sometimes specifically and by example, and sometimes they will be mentioned by implication. The collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and its official distributor Botland has resulted in over 1200 products on offer.
Raspberry Pi 4
June 2019
A tiny desktop computer with two displays and a complete desktop familiar from PCs, as well as. the brain for a robot, the heart of a games console, a smart home system, the media centre for TV and music in the home, the network core of artificial intelligence, a factory controller and the best friend of business and industry.
Raspberry Pi 400
October 2020
Compact desktop computer built into the keyboard. Quad-core 64 bit processor, 4K video playback. Plus a mouse, power supply, HDMI cable, SD card with intuitive RPi OS, official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide at hand.
Attach a display or monitor and voila.
Raspberry Pi Pico
January 2021
There it is – Raspberry Pi little baby. From controlling devices to operating the display, it puts the technology behind countless daily activities in the hands of the novice user and a wealth of possibilities for the more advanced. The accessories keep coming, it connects better than traditional jigsaw puzzles and has been trusted by thousands of satisfied Botland customers already.
Debunking Raspberry Pi myths
Myth 1. Raspberry Pi is difficult
It depends on what is difficult for us, but in general… no, it isn’t. Don’t forget that the Raspberry Pi was created as an educational platform. The Raspberry Pi is at least as easy to use as a Windows PC for the same tasks and with the same knowledge. The average beginner has some experience using Windows. The word Linux, on the other hand, inspires a general fear and association with something for professionals only, but why not try another system? Many of us have worked on Linux and praise Ubuntu. Many also use the popular “mac”, or macOS, from Apple. Entering the Raspberry Pi world for the first time will be confusing, but so was Windows when we knew nothing about it. Installing new software is simple, but you do need to learn the procedure.
Do stock up on 5 simple things:
- Raspberry Pi computer,
- microSD card,
- power supply,
- display / monitor,
- keyboard and mouse…
…and installing the operating system with a few clicks and typing in a ready-made command can be daunting? This simultaneously answers another equally mythical subsidiary question: is it hard to connect? Or the infuriating: how do you plug it in!? Well, it is very simple to plug it in, and the hardware is no different to the one you use when browsing the Botland blog.
Myth 2. Raspberry Pi is for professionals only
Again, the answer is negative – no. It ties in, as it were, with the myth above. But this is a good opportunity to bring up another topic. Do you know what we think the problem is? In the very appearance of the Raspberry Pi.
This is a Raspberry Pi on the top and Pimoroni Cluster HAT v2.3 on the bottom – a module for cluster-connecting our Pis. The picture is quite big, so you can see everything in detail. How does it look like to you? According to some, it looks like a terribly complicated device for specialists only, or like a prototype of something that is just being developed in electronics workshop. Most people will recognise at most a USB cable and a socket, well, maybe even a fragment of a memory card. The technical green colour of the circuit board, some bare connectors – and you can already see in your mind’s eye an old, ripped CRT TV. Or something that would gladly kick us in the finger with electricity. Not all of us trust bare electronics. See how much a well-chosen casing can do.
At once the computer looks familiar – not a bit like the powerbank we carry in our pocket?
When we look at laptops and PCs, we don’t see what lies hidden in the guts and under the lid. We only become interested when something breaks. Or we entrust it to professionals and wait for a ready to work device to be collected from the service centre. And once again: computers can be used for everyday work, playing video games or other entertainment, but also for programming. The Raspberry Pi can do the same, and for much cheaper. Although we can rather forget about running Cyberpunk 2077, there is nothing holding us from building gaming stations like the Gaming Pi consoles.
Raspberry Pi is selling millions of its boards. Total sales figures released in 2019 show that with such diverse applications, Raspberry Pi sales have blossomed on an incredible scale over the past five years. It grew from just 700,000 units in 2013 to almost 4 million units in 2014. In 2016 it reached 10 million units, in 2017 it was 14 million units, and now it has surpassed 30 million in total and globally. Could this scale of interest mean that this is for professionals only kind of hardware?
Myth 3. Raspberry Pi has limited capabilities at best
Well, everything has limited possibilities. One would like to say that everything depends on the price. More precisely, it is a question of price in relation to quality and capability. If you can have something cheaper and this thing performs everything we expect from it, why overpay?
Let’s look at this Raspberry Pi 4 through the prism of three parameters, which are considered by anyone planning to buy a computer.
Raspberry Pi processor
Broadcom BCM2711. It has been designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi. It can compete with the performance of fourth-generation Intel Core mobile processors present in devices such as PCs and smartphones. We bet that many of you have phones with processors of similar specifications or even less efficient ones. Popular comparisons with other can be found here, and there’s also the exact specifications of Raspberry Pi 4B processor.
Raspberry Pi RAM
8 GB RAM – the minimum when it comes to gaming. Many new games run on medium settings with such memory – generally enough, although “newer games” are getting… newer, and we’re writing this in June of 2021. So much for gentle article updates.
8 GB RAM in Raspberry Pi 4 is a really comfortable amount. More than 8 GB in a smartphone meant, until recently, “fiddly” overpaying for the specification. In March 2020, according to a poll conducted by one of Polish online gaming portals “How much RAM does your PC have?”, 29.7% of people answered with 8 GB of RAM. The PS4 and Xbox One have 8 GB of RAM, which is shared between the RAM and graphics chip. There are also models with less memory, including 4 GB in RPi 400.
Raspberry Pi communication (USB, sockets and stuff)
It’s hard to imagine a modern device without an USB port. The Universal Serial Bus has even spread around the world like Coca-Cola. The Raspberry Pi is not about weird connectors that only specialist electronics engineers are familiar with. We realise that not everyone has heard of solder pins, I2C interfaces or GPIO. The Raspberry Pi will connect to the world for us like any other popular device, as it has dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth in various standards including 5 / BLE, an Ethernet port with speeds up to 1000 Mbps and the ability to be powered by Power over Ethernet.
Unconvinced? Start with Botland.
Real computer doesn’t have to be huge – just see how easy it is.
