From the course: Raspberry Pi Essential Training

Raspberry Pi is the essence of a computer

From the course: Raspberry Pi Essential Training

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Raspberry Pi is the essence of a computer

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- [Instructor] A computer is a machine with four parts: input, memory, processing, and output. Every computer provides a way to give it information. Most often, we think of a keyboard and a mouse, but it can also be wifi, ethernet, serial ports, or specialized electronics. The Raspberry Pi has all of these methods on the circuit board and especially provides a set of pins for input of electronic signals. Computers use memory to, well, remember things. This can be internal, such as random access memory or RAM and read only memory or ROM. Computers also have external mass storage, such as a hard drive or cloud storage. The Raspberry Pi has memory as well. It uses a memory chip on board and an SD card for external storage. The Raspberry Pi can also use USB flash drives for external storage. A computer wouldn't be a computer unless it could perform math. And that's the role of a central processing unit. In smaller computers, this is contained inside a system on a chip. On a Raspberry Pi, there is an ARM CPU and a Broadcom SOC or system on a chip, which is nice to know but pretty much useless information. It's enough to know the Raspberry Pi will perform calculations. You don't need to know what processor it is using to do that. Finally, a computer has a way to provide information back out to the world. Most often, this is output to a video monitor, but it can also be controlling motors or sending data to other computers. On the Raspberry Pi, there is an HDMI video port as well as network connections. The Raspberry Pi also has pins to send electronic signals to devices. This is the purpose of the GPIO or General-Purpose Input/Output. It's best to think of a Raspberry Pi as just another computer. It's smaller but it does everything a full-size computer can do.

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