Raspberry Pi.

For the last couple of years, a couple of parents have asked what kind of things they might do at home for their student who is interested in coding.

My reliable fallback answer is "Raspberry Pi."

This one in a yellow case was mine until I mailed it off to our oldest child (a computer science major) who had a need to do some low level work on an ARM processor.  Do NOT worry if none of that sentence made sense. :-D

I replaced it, of course, but I still miss the sticker.  I often try to have 3-4 of the zeros on hand, and give them out when I find myself around college nerds and see a project I think is cool. 


A complete - except for monitor and keyboard/mouse - setup will run between $35 (for a Pi Zero W) and about twice that for a Pi 3B+.
Microcenter usually has the base zero Ws (no accessories) on sale for $5 and there's a limit of one per customer.

They are available from Amazon,
Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/category/175
Microcenter - there's one near the Cincinnati Ikea - http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntk=all&sortby=match&N=4294910344+4294819333+4294818915

And probably Fry's.   I think I've seen them at Target and Barnes and Noble in the past, but that's been quite a while.

Anyway ...

There is a ton of information at the Raspberry Pi foundation's own site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/  but here's a little overview anyway:

The 3B+ has 4 USB ports, a full size HDMI connector, 4 cores and twice the memory.
The Zero costs less and is tiny - a little bigger than a pack of chewing gum.
They both have wifi and bluetooth.

Size wise, the Pi is something like 85x23 mm, or about 3.3 x 2.2 inches if exercising your birthright to imperial measurements is a thing you're into

Oh the perils of mixing measurement systems

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lightsaber.png

Anyway, the Pi was created because the boffins at some really impressive university in the UK discovered that school aged children didn't have the experience with both hardware and software that earlier students did, and in turn that made filling their computer science classes harder than it should be.   Rather than moaning about it, they created the Raspberry Pi foundation and designed their own.

They're mostly made in Wales, home to some truly astonishing town names.  The video is an hour long, so you might not want to click the link:

The Pi uses a pretty nifty Linux variant, and don't panic if you've never used it before.  The instructions for how to install it and get it working are on the foundation's page (Adafruit also has a lot of Pi info) and it's not all that complicated.  The foundation's site even has a page to help guide parents through the trauma: https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/parents-guide/

The software packages included in the base OS change a little from time to time, so I won't go too much into that here, but they usually include some Java and Python development tools plus something like Scratch and they have included a lightweight version of Wolfram Mathematica as well.

 I have no connection to any of the links provided here, and can't make an official endorsement, but I've bought and given away several and have 2 or 3 hanging around now that I use for playing around with different OS's, ways of programming microcontrollers using the IO pins, that sort of thing.  I'm thinking about seeing how Jenkins works on one for my next experiment.

It isn't perfect by any means, but despite - or because of - its incongruous nature the whole package works a lot better than you'd think.  And like these guys from Finland, I'm actually a little thunderstruck.