Raspberry PI Model B (Rather late than never)

After some patience the Raspberry PI is available locally in South Africa no need to wait awfully long periods as advertised, here are some pictures of the model B I purchased over the weekend, the device is really, really small (credit card size to be specific see the pictures below)

The heart of the PI is powered by a ARM11 BCM2835 (ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor) it’s a complete multimedia system on chip solution that’s found in many mobile / multimedia devices today which contains core system peripherals that makes up a computer. The only issue I had was obtaining a suitable power supply to power the device the minimal current rating specified by the official technical documentation recommends a 5 volts @ 700mA to power the device, the local supplier didn’t have stock of a suitable power supplies for the pi (bummer)… I wasn’t short of a solution a spare 5volt @ 750mA blackberry charger soon found another use, it was rated 50mA, 50mA more than the minimum so it worked pretty well. (Please note that loading the USB ports with USB hardware that draws a lot of current will of course force you to use a 5v @ 1.0Aamp supply)

Size comparison PI VS a debit card

The raspberry PI will probably be used as a multimedia device only as a replacement for the faulty DVD player. I will be looking at getting another one for python and Linux kernel based development research in the future at the moment I have other priorities to attend to.