Buying your first Raspberry Pi

So you want to get into the world of Raspberry Pi but not sure what you need? Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

There are a quite few components/parts you can buy for your Raspberry Pi but what is the minimum required? Well basically you need the circuit board and a way to power it, plus a SD card to store your operating system on – this is an absolute minimum.

Best way to get started is buy a kit like I did. You can get them off Ebay or from a company called Element 14. That’s where I got mine from. In my kit i got the circuit board (model B), power supply, SD card with images preloaded and a case to house my Pi. It cost AUD$71.50 (including postage) and once ordered the ‘starter kit’ only took a couple of days to get delivered to my home.

Above I mentioned ‘model b’. What does that mean? There are two models. The difference between the two are that the Model A has 256MB RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). The Model B has 512MB RAM, 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port.

What did my starter kit look like when I got it? I’m glad you asked. It came in a fairly boring looking box:

raspberry-pi-unpack-1

Opening the box revealed everything I needed to get into the world of Pi.

raspberry-pi-unpack-3

 

That’s all I needed, and it was only about 2 minutes before I had the Pi powered up exploring what I  could do…..

In future posts we’ll get into some of the real interesting stuff.

Have you got a Pi? What components/parts did you buy when you got your first Pi? Leave a comment below.

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