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What is Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries.
The original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside of its target market for uses such as robotics.
Over 5 million Raspberry Pis have been sold before February 2015, making it the best-selling British computer. By November 2016 they had sold 11 million units.

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Raspberry Pi Sale

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

Specifications

Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz

1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM (depending on model)

2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE

Gigabit Ethernet

2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports.

Raspberry Pi standard 40 pin GPIO header (fully backwards compatible with previous boards)

2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported)

2-lane MIPI DSI display port

2-lane MIPI CSI camera port

4-pole stereo audio and composite video port

H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)

OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0

Micro-SD card slot for loading operating system and data storage

5V DC via USB-C connector (minimum 3A*)

5V DC via GPIO header (minimum 3A*)

Power over Ethernet (PoE) enabled (requires separate PoE HAT)

Operating temperature: 0 – 50 degrees C ambient

Features

All models feature a Broadcom system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM compatible central processing unit (CPU) and an on-chip graphics processing unit (GPU, a VideoCore IV).
CPU speed ranges from 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz for the Pi 3 and on board memory range from 256 MB to 1 GB RAM.
Secure Digital (SD) cards are used to store the operating system and program memory in either the SDHC or MicroSDHC sizes.

Features

Most boards have between one and four USB slots, HDMI and composite video output, and a 3.5 mm phono jack for audio.
Lower level output is provided by a number of GPIO pins which support common protocols like I²C.
The B-models have an 8P8C Ethernet port and the Pi 3 and Pi Zero W have on board Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth.

Operating System

The Foundation provides Raspbian, a Debian- based Linux distribution for download, as well as third party Ubuntu, Windows 10 IOT Core, RISC OS, and specialised media center distributions.
It promotes Python and Scratch as the main programming language, with support for many other languages.
The default firmware is closed source, while an unofficial open source is available.