At Townsville computer repairs Nerds we always like it when we can introduce new and innovative products which are fun for our customers and don’t cost a lot of money.
We are asked a lot what is the cheapest computer our customers can buy?
I want to introduce to you the Raspberry Pi. Even though at this point in time it does not replace your home or work computer or laptop, it is still avery cheap, small and fun computer to do things with.
The Raspberry Pi is a very small computer, less than the size of your wallet which you can plug a keyboard, mouse and monitor in and program using languages such as Scratch and Pytho.
At this point in time (2016) the latest version is the Raspberry Pi which you can buy on Ebay for about $60.
The Raspberry Pi 3 has now been fitted out with built in wifi to accompany its LAN connection which means you can use it over your home or work wifi network.
Its also come with a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU which is 10 times faster than the original Raspberry Pi and 1 gigabyte of memory.
The Raspberry Pi does not come with a hard drive but has a Micro SD Card slow for removable storage.
There are many different Operating System you can run on the Raspberry Pi 3 which can be downloaded from their website. The recommend operating system is Raspbian which is based on teh Debian Linux operating system.
Linux is an alternative operating system to Windows a lot of home users will not be familiar with but with a bit of practice, patience and know how can be quite secure and powerful.
Raspberry Pi vs Arduino
When people get into the very small computer market to learn and play around they either usually buy one of two devices, the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino.
Other than the size of both devices, they do not have a lot in common at all. The Raspberry Pi is actually a computer and the Ardunio is actually a Micro controller.
The Arduino does not have an operating system and the code is executed directly without any of the overhead of an operating system like Windows or linux.
If you are looking for a small computer with an operating system and basic tools, it would be better at this point to choose a Raspberry Pi over a Arduino board.
What Can I do with a Raspberry Pi
Everything from word processing, to surfing the internet and robotics can be done with your Raspberry Pi 3.
I have heard of people using the Raspberry PI because of its size and prices to:
- make robotic arms and equipment
- control weather stations
- run Firefox web browser to surf the internet
- hacking tool for naughty people
- Bittorrent server
- playing games like Minecraft
- running a mobile cloud server
Is a Raspberry Pi safe from viruses
There are a lot more viruses out there for Windows computers than there are Linux machines. Because Raspberry Pi 3’s use the Linux operating system it falls into this category.
At this current time pretty much every virus made or affecting a Raspberry Pi has been created and texted to see if it can actually be done.
The best way to protect yourself from viruses if you are using or tinkering with a Raspberry Pi is to make sure you ue the a repo system where you can download and installed verified programs and apps which have already been tested and made sure they are free forom virus and the code actually works.
For all your Townsville computer repairs needs please call Ross on 0402 807 890.
