When you buy a Raspberry Pi, you are essentially buying an assembled printed circuit board. It does not even include a power supply or operating system.
The recipes in this chapter are concerned with getting your Raspberry Pi set up and ready for use.
Because the Raspberry Pi just uses standard USB keyboards and mice, most of the setup is pretty straightforward, so you will concentrate only on those tasks that are specific to the Raspberry Pi.
1.1 Selecting a Model of Raspberry Pi
Problem
There are many models of Raspberry Pi and you are not sure which to use.
Solution
If you want a Raspberry Pi for general use, then you should buy a Raspberry Pi 3 or 2 model B. With four times as much memory and a quad-core processor, it will cope with most tasks much better than the Pi Zero or model A+ with their single processors. The Raspberry Pi 3 model B has the great advantage of having WiFi built in, so there’s no need for an extra USB WiFi adapter.
If, on the other hand, you are embedding a Raspberry Pi in a project for a single purpose, then using a model A+ or Pi Zero and saving a few dollars may well be an option.
Discussion
Figure 1-1 shows the Pi Zero, model A+, and Raspberry Pi 2 B.
Figure 1-1. Raspberry Pi Zero (left), model A+ (center), and Raspberry Pi 2 model B (right)
As you can see from Figure 1-1, the model A+ is ...
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