I got a new toy this week at work:  A Raspberry Pi.

It’s a small computer the size of a mint tin that costs about $35. I comes just as a board, but I invested in a nice case for it. Instead of a hard drive you  use a SD card for storage of the operating system and you main drive.  My aim is to use it as a controller for other devices.  As you can see on the upper left of the board in the photo, there is a set of pins called the GPIO, (General Purpose Input/output) which you can connect directly to and control or sense stuff from. The programming language directly controls these pins. You can then programmatically  make the pins either input or output.

I got it up and running on Friday, and Monday I’ll start to do some stuff with it. However, the  primary programming language is far from Xcode. Instead, it’s Python.

Python is different. It’s dynamically typed so no declaring variables. It’s also interpreted, so no compiling and building. It’s also a lot more universal.  I even have it running on my iPad.

And looking at some books I bought on Python and Raspberry Pi, there is some things I need to wrap my head around between Raspberry Pi and Xcode.

I’ll post some of those this week.