The Raspberry Pi is the worlds best known single board computer. Now it’s grown up and comes as a fully working PC inside of a cute keyboard – like the ZX Spectrum used to do in the old days.
I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 400 and I have to say it’s far exceeded my expectations. 4 GB of ram is plenty and the processor is snappy and handles HD video just fine. My new favourite game, 0AD (“Zero A.D”), which stutters on an old celeron laptop runs with ease. There are 3 usb ports, as well as the backwards compatible GPIO header, which will work with any Raspberry Pi GPIO project you can think of – sensors, buttons, camera, you name it.
The 400 also comes with WiFi, Ethernet and Bluetooth. The SD card was pre-loaded with Raspberry Pi OS which is a nice user friendly Linux distribution based on Debian. The only issue I had was with some video not playing on VLC, which I had to fix by downloading the latest version of Raspbian – which even booted from a live USB.
Oh you do need an HDMI capable monitor or TV for it to work.
Big Plans
I have recently started working on my “Circus Scientist Show“. This show incorporates projected multimedia and interactive electronics projects, and is aimed at introducing school kids to electronics and programming in a fun way. The whole thing is going to be based around the Raspberry Pi 400.
Technologies used in the show include the “makey makey“, Arduino, Processing, Scratch, Fritzing, FreeCad, AI and more.
Coming soon – what to do after you get your Raspberry Pi 400. Including installing Processing, Arduino setup, and booting from USB.
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