First Steps with the Raspberry Pi: Introduction – The Linux Portal Site.

The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise.

In the Adafruit store we have a new Raspberry Pi section, check it out!

We added lots of basic but essential goodies. First up, there’s a big prototyping area, half of which is ‘breadboard’ style and half of which is ‘perfboard’ style so you can wire up DIP chips, sensors, and the like. Along the edges of the proto area, all the GPIO/I2C/SPI and power pins are broken out to 0.1″ stips so you can easily connect to them. On the edges of the prototyping area, all of the pins are also connected to 3.5mm screw-terminal blocks. This makes it easy to semi-permanently wire in sensors, LEDs, etc. Finally, we had a little space remaining over the metal connectors so we put in an SOIC surface mount chip breakout area, for those chips that dont come in DIP format.

The nice thing about this plate is we’re getting custom header breakouts that are taller than usual, so that the proto plate sits above the metal connectors, out of the way and allows for plenty of workspace. We’ll have stackable header kits as well for those who want to put multiple plates on top.

What is the Raspberry Pi? A low-cost ARM GNU/Linux box.

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The design is based on a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 256 megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. The Foundation plans to support Fedora Linux as the initial system software package/distribution, with support for Debian and Arch Linux as well – Wikipedia.

*Please note, this is the sign up page for the Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate Kit for Raspberry Pi, we are currently testing this product with the shipping Raspberry Pi and will release it once it’s ready! We have not set the pricing or ETA yet. We’ve also asked to become a Raspberry Pi distributor if and when they’re ready to do that.

Sign up here.

A lot of folks are asking what and if we’re going to do with the Raspberry Pi. Since today is Pi day we can share some of our plans and experiments – we have a series “Pi Plates” for @Raspberry_Pi – “Shields” for the Raspberry Pi. Right now no one has shipping hardware so like everyone else we are waiting to get the read hardware to test our designs. We have a few ready to go based on the information out there and will have more later (and updated) once we test. There are no details beyond this and no ETA (don’t ask!) Please keep in mind this is an experiment, if something crazy happens we might not be able to do these of course. However – if someone gets an extra one and can get it to us to test we’ll give you a set of “Pi Plates” for the assistance if and when they’re done. At Adafruit we think we have the best line up of accessories for the Arduino and Beagle Bone, we think you’ll like what we have cooking for the Pi if it all works out Once we have anything to show we’ll devote a segment on our weekly video show – ASK AN ENGINEER.