Have you heard about the mini computer which can be placed in your palm? It is also the cheapest computer available in the market. I am talking about Element14`s Raspberry Pi Model B+. We got an opportunity to review this amazing product. It does remind me of my college days and made me felt in the student mode.
Element14 Raspberry Pi B+ Features
Design
What can we expect from a Raspberry Pi? Yes it is a very compact sized CPU. You can see each and every component of the Raspberry Pi. You will see a lot of components mounted on the green PCB board. As a computer engineer it felt like an honor to have this device in my hand. In the first glance you can see that there are an array of components attached to the PCB.
Let us start with the Power IN(PWR IN). It is situated in the bottom left of the board. You can connect it to an USB cable. You can use the same USB cable through which you connect your computer and smartphone(Samsung galaxy Y). Besides the Power IN you can see the HDMI port. Right of the HDMI port you can see a port which is for camera.
Then a 3.5mm jack is placed next to it. You also have Ethernet connectivity as there is a LAN Port. It is situated in the bottom right corner of the device. Above that you can see 4 USB ports. For connecting it to display the port is placed at the left of the CPU. Also for the users there is a microSD card slot which is hidden below the CPU
Performance
The device has a Broadcom BCM2835 Processor. You can see a lot of Broadcom processors used in the smartphones. With a 512 MB RAM this mini computer is no less than a mid range smartphone available in the market. We connected the device using a microUSB cable to supply the power. We used the HDMI cable for connecting it to our mega projector in our office. It shows a configuration menu with a list of commands.
The weight of the cpu is just 71 grams. You can create one of the lightest computers of your choice. We also tested the benchmark score of the computer. To be honest you got to have the desired cables to make the CPU efficient and make it usable. The performance seeing the price point and compactness of the device was superb.
Conclusion
This advanced version of the Rasberry is a must use CPU. There lots of I/O ports and the price is very much appealing. We liked the device a lot.
Nikhil Narkhede
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Raspberry Pi is sold by Element14 and a few other vendors in India. It is not Element14’s product as the post implies.