Mastering the Raspberry Pi

CHAPTER 2

The Raspberry Pi

Before considering the details about each resource within the Raspberry Pi, it is useful to take a high-level inventory. In this chapter, let’s just list what you get when you purchase a Pi.

In later chapters, you’ll be looking at each resource from two perspectives:

• The hardware itself—what it is and how it works
• The driving software and API behind it

In some cases, the hardware will have one or more kernel modules behind it, forming the device driver layer. They expose a software API that interfaces between the application and the hardware device. For example, applications communicate with the driver by using ioctl(2) ...