Raspberry Pi & Arduino
 |
| Arduino UNO (Left) & The Raspberry Pi (right) together |
RASPBERRY PI
Raspberry Pi is a pencil box sized (or even smaller than that) single board computer that plugs into a HDMI TV or Screen and 2 or more [if used an USB hub], USB device. It even has a ethernet slot, & a SD card slot. It’s a ARM11 processor-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. Its actually a personal computer without the monitor, keyboard and mouse, just you can think of being provided with the motherboard. High-Definition videos, & even many 3D games can be played on it. The Raspberry Pi model B board, comes without operating system, SD card, power supply, keyboard, case or cables. But the main thing is that it contains 700 Mhz (overclocked upto 1.2Ghz) dual core processor (ARM11), who does all the things.
- Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
- GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 512MB RAM
- Boots from SD card, running a version of Linux, (Raspbian particularly)
- 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
- Price: Rs 1450 (exc VAT & delivery)
What that means is:
- You can write program in it in C++, Java, python or some other language. You may indeed be able to take an application you already have and compile it to run on the Pi / Due without making any changes.
- With the Arduino Uno or equivalent boards (excluding Arduino DUE) , you would need to create a sketch in the Arduino Programming language. Its not that hard - it looks very C-like. There are a ton of libraries and classes available for Arduino - so it is possible to make it do just about anything a home automation project might want, but yes playing HD Videos & High definition games on it is not at all possible, as the heart of Arduino, an 8 bit Microcontroller hasn't got much power.
Here are few more points to be considered:
- You can get an Arduino board with many of different I/O devices and other interface configurations in the price of a Raspberry Pi.
- The Pi is a computer
- Pi - for Rs.1500 you get video, audio, ethernet, and USB
- That will cost you 2 times more, to get the same on top of an Arduino UNO.
- The Arduino UNO runs comfortably on just a few milliamps.
- The Raspberry Pi needs more like 700mA, you have to use your samsung mobile battery charger as a power supply.
NOTE: One interesting thing is that, they both can be connected together & can be worked together as a single unit.
