I have a regular technology club that meets twice a month after school at the library. It’s made up of middle and young high school students, and since its inception last year, I’ve really tried to follow their lead in the projects we pursue. This fall, when we started up and all of last year’s teens joined back up and I gained some new kids, we had to shift around a bit before deciding on our projects. I showed them some of the toys, tools, and robots that we’ve reviewed here at Robot Test Kitchen, and finally they settled on something that I had heard about for a while but learned more about at a recent Tinker meeting. It’s a project that I felt both totally comfortable with, because it’s really just a computer, and completely intimidated by, because it’s a teeny tiny computer that runs an OS I haven’t played with since grad school.

Robot Basics:

• What is it?

Raspberry Pi is a fully functioning palm sized computer that runs Linux.

• What’s in the Box?

You can purchase just the Pi, or you can buy a kit that comes with some essential components. I purchased the Cana Kit Complete Starter Kit, which comes with the following (from the website):