Main Board
The core raspberry pi hardware boards
Add-ons
Other boards that can be connected to the raspberry pi
Accessories
Other accessories for the raspberry pi
This section contains technical information about the Raspberry Pi main boards, add-on boards and accessories
The first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system.
Datasheet 201 Raspberry Pi ComputerDownload the full datasheet as a pdf
The Raspberry Pi Foundation
The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton was lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University.
Eben had noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them.
From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that.
Fewer people were applying to the course every year. Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers.
Datasheet 202 Raspberry Pi IODownload the full datasheet as a pdf
General Purpose I/O
The Raspberry Pi allows peripherals and expansion boards (such as the upcoming Gertboard) to access the CPU by exposing the inputs and outputs.
The production board has a 26-pin 2.54mm (100mil) expansion header, arranged in a 2x13 strip. They provide 8 GPIO pins plus access to I2C, SPI, UART), as well as +3V3, +5V and GND supply lines. Pin one is column 0 on the bottom row.
Gert van Loo, who did most of the heavy hardware lifting on the alpha boards we sent out to developers a few months back, is a familiar name to our forum members. He’s a friend of ours who works at Broadcom with Eben, and in his spare time (the spare time that he hasn’t been dedicating to the Raspberry Pi itself) he’s been working on an add-on GPIO expansion board. Use it to flash LEDs on and off, drive motors, run sensors and all that other fun stuff.
Datasheet 351 Slice of PiDownload the full datasheet as a pdf
These accesories are produced and distributed by independent vendors, and self-certified
for use with the Raspberry Pi. These products are believed to be compatible with the
Raspberry Pi but are not "officially" endorsed, certified or approved by the Raspberry Pi
Foundation unless explicitly stated on the www.raspberrypi.org website.
Product Information
Convienient small break out board for the Raspberry PI. XBee style connector for XRF / XBee / RN-XV / XBT / RF-BEE etc.
Has the SPI and I2C pins on one standard 8 way header and the Raspberry PI's 8 general purpose I/O pins on another for easy access.
There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.
Over the next few years, Eben, having left the university for industry, worked on building prototypes of what has now become the Raspberry Pi in his spare time.
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