What is Raspberry Pi?

 Raspberry Pi is a series of small single board computers developed by Raspberry Pi Foundation along with Broadcom. Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British charity and company having an aim to promote the study of basic computer science in schools. Broadcom Inc. is an American company. Raspberry Pi is quite popular in hobby electronics and Amateur Radio. Raspberry Pi supports HDMI and USB standards. First model was released in 2012.


Raspberry Pi 400 was released in 2020. It has 4GB of RAM and is combined with a keyboard in a single case. It has an upgraded switch mode power supply (SMPS). The processor can be clocked at 1.8 GHz which is 20% faster than the previous version.

Raspberry Pi OS is a Unix-like operating system for the Raspberry Pi series. It has been the primary operating system for Raspberry Pi series since 2013. It is free and Open Source, distributed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Earlier generations of Raspberry Pi needed external ethernet or WiFi adapters for networking. Later a built-in USB ethernet adaptor was included. Still later, WiFi and Bluetooth support were added. Raspberry Pi 4 has full gigabit Ethernet support.

Raspberry Pi 5: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic image by SparkFun Electronics, from Wikipedia

Raspberry Pi 5 came in 2023. It is supposed to be twice as powerful as Pi 4. But it lacks a 3.5 mm audio/video jack. If you want to hear sound out of Pi 5, you can use Bluetooth, HDMI, USB audio or an Audio HAT. Audio HAT is a sound card HAT designed for Raspberry Pi, which has low power consumption, and supports stereo encoding and decoding. It features Hi-FI playing and recording and can directly drive speakers to paly music. HAT stands for Hardware Attached on Top, a type of add-on module for the Raspberry Pi. Pi 5 has 4GB and 8GB RAM models, with higher cost for the latter, as expected.

There are also smaller versions of Raspberry Pi known as Raspberry Pi Zero, which was released in 2015 and Raspberry Pi Pico released in 2021. Both have newer versions with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W launched in 2021 and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 launched in August 2024. Another related product of interest to radio amateurs is Radioberry, an HF transceiver board for frequencies ranging from 1- 30 MHz.

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