David Sandys, Director of Technical Marketing at Digi-Key Electronics with all the latest Raspberry Pi news.
News about Raspberry Pi
With so many development platforms and computing options to choose from, there really is a solution to help get every design imaginable off the ground. Digi-Key recently became an authorized distributor for the complete line of Digi-Key products. Raspberry Pi, offering one of the best solutions for everything from rapid prototyping to production-ready designs.
The full line of Raspberry Pi products includes low-cost, high-performance single-board computers and development boards designed to help users of all levels with computing and digital design. Embraced by students and makers, as well as startups and OEMs, as a leading provider of low-cost, high-performance computers, the Raspberry Pi helps users learn, solve problems, and create solutions.
A Raspberry Pi Shared Mission
The Raspberry Pi shares Digi-Key's commitment to accompany and inspire engineers around the world to take their innovations from ideation to production, through design and prototyping. They continue to see tremendous acceleration in the use of their products in a wide range of industrial applications.
A fully functional computer for $35/140L is what the Raspberry Pi is all about, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation works to put the power of digital fabrication in the hands of people around the world, so they can understand and shape our digital world, capable of solving the problems that matter to them and equipped for the jobs of tomorrow.
Recently, the Raspberry Pi announced its first MCU-based board, the Raspberry Pi Peak, which uses their RP2040 microcontroller, which is a $4/16L board capable of running C and MicroPython development environments. The Pico is new, so we'll focus on traditional Raspberry Pi solutions for the rest of this article, but it's worth noting that it has a robust set of peripherals including SPI, I2C, programmable I/O, 264KB of RAM and the ability to support up to 16MB of off-chip Flash.
A powerful tool for rapid prototyping Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi takes advantage of the Linux operating system right out of the box, making it quick and easy to get up and running with rapid prototyping. Its operating system is a modified version of Debian called Raspbian. With one of the most robust ecosystems around, there are hundreds of add-on boards called Hats to expand both the feature set and peripherals, from displays and connectivity solutions to sensor suites, cameras, LEDs, and motor control. A large number of housings, power supplies and human interface solutions help complete the design solutions.
Plus, there's a strong online community to take advantage of existing code repositories and support, with tons of tutorials and sample projects to get your design up and running, too. In addition, there are various price points depending on the specific needs of the applications and the design that offer a great trade-off of memory and performance.
All of these advantages allow designers to focus on their own “special sauce”, rather than having to reinvent parts of their solution that can be leveraged by already available hardware and software.
A path to production
No other platform on the market offers as many robust card engine solutions, which in the case of the Raspberry Pi are known as compute modules. These compute modules allow you to create application-specific carrier boards in your own footprint that meet specific project needs. There are also many Design Service Providers (DSPs) that help turn a working prototype into a production-ready solution. The Raspberry Pi also has IO carrier boards to help compute module-based designs get started easily.
Product availability
Digi-Key stocks the full range of Raspberry Pi products, including the recently released Compute Module 4 and Pico families, which are ideal for Digi-Key's global customers. The incorporation of Raspberry Pi 400 keyboardBeautifully designed, it shows that they are serious about becoming a staple on desks around the world.
So what could be your next Raspberry Pi creation? Check out Digi-Key's summary at Maker.IO of all kinds of potential projects that you could start with today.
David Sandys is director of technical marketing for Digi-Key Electronics. Digi-Key is one of the world's largest distributors of electronic components, offering more than 11.5 million products with more than 2.6 million in stock and available for immediate shipment, from more than 1500 quality name-brand manufacturers.
