Raspberry Pi Peripherals

The internet doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Google decides to show me some love for a horribly written piece of the Raspberry Pi, and now I fear that the vast number of visitors (mainly British) who were looking for information on the Raspberry Pi, but instead received poorly written dry humor. This may be because “dry humor” translated into American English becomes “blatant lies told with a straight face”. American presidential candidates speak almost exclusively in dry humor.
This post is for all of the people that had to wade through the sloppy misinformation of the previous post. Welly welly welly welly welly welly well, prepare to get proper chaffed as this yank wanker abuses British slang while telling you folks about the wallops of dosh needed for Raspberry Pi’s peripherals.

Don’t worry Australians, we’ve got heaps of rooty tooty point n’ shooty slang for you as well, mate.

For the Japanese people who ended up here, looking for information and slang, マジ神情報あるじゃん.

And for the Scottish friends, “arse shite shite arse fooking fook beer shite mate”. (Just kidding guys, I’m only taking the piss, which in American English is a euphemism for stealing American beer)

britishchap

This chap measures in at 0.8 Nigels, the standard unit of measurement for Britishness.

The Raspberry Pi was released on February 29th and sold out immediately. It will now be produced in small batches by two British companies – RS and Element 14 – which will also handle distribution more capably than the Raspberry Pi organization itself. These companies are selling on a first come first served basis, requiring you to register. I registered minutes after the Raspberry Pi website crashed, but still must have missed the window of opportunity. Either that, or they didn’t like my included comments of “Pish posh, good lads! My word, what a strapping day for a computing! I do say! Just kidding, I’m American and Budweiser is the best product in the world. Suck on that one, dawg! PS. Do you do next day delivery?”

The Raspberry Pi comes in two models, much like I intend to do if I ever win the lottery. There is a cheap and practically worthless model, and a cheap and versatile model, differentiated by a LAN port. Without the LAN port, you are going to need to use an external drive for data transfer, or load everything up onto the SD card and reboot every time you want to add something to it.
The computer is pretty affordable already, and weighing in at 22 pounds, most Americans wouldn’t even think twice about eating it. In American dollars, it clocks in at 35, and in Japanese yen, it is drastically overpriced in relation to other currencies at 3400 yen, which is about 43 American dollars. These prices really aren’t too bad in the grand scheme of things, but you need to realize that you are going to need additional cords and peripherals.

You are going to need:

  • A power cord and plug (5$) – More specifically, a plug and a USB to Micro-USB cable. Since Americans use a different measurement system than the British, I don’t know what the British equivalent of Volts are and cannot make any recommendations on a proper plug, but expect to spend at least 5 dollars on this.
  • An SD card (17$) – This price is for a 16GB model, but you could probably get by with an 8GB for even less. Without this, you literally cannot do anything with the Raspberry Pi as a computer.
  • A keyboard (10$) – It should have at least 1 key for every letter in the alphabet. Some people pay more for high-society keyboards with additional keys.
  • A mouse (7.5$) – You probably have a spare USB mouse. If you don’t, you don’t need to go hog-wild with something too fancy. Do Brits say “hog wild”? Probably not. You don’t have to go swine-uncouth with something too posh.
  • A LAN cable (1.66666666$) – I think that LAN cables bud apart like yeast, because every time I open my cable box, there seems to be a few more LAN cables. Any of you nerdier folks probably have 1 cable for every year you’ve owned a computer, so you won’t need to buy this.
  • An HDMI cable (2.5$) – You may even need an adapter if you wish to run this on a monitor without HDMI, but this should allow you to connect to most newer televisual sets.

We’re talking about a computer that doesn’t come with a power switch here, it certainly isn’t going to be packaged with anything that it doesn’t need to be packaged with. After advertising the low price for so long, they are locked in to that. They even skipped out on including a battery, so the system won’t even keep the time after you shut it down. Oh lawdy, dat’s some cost cuttin’ sho’ nuff. Whoops, I slipped out of British slang and into racist 1930s stereotype slang….Guv’na.

Everyone is getting whipped into a frenzy over these, myself included. But if you are to stop and analyze what you get with this, you may want to reconsider based on what your intentions are.
Some good uses that I can think of are:

  • Running an NES, SNES, or Genesis/Megadrive emulator, and hooking it up to your TV –
    This won’t require the LAN port on the unit itself, but you will have to have access to an internet connection to legally obtain backups of games that you own.
  • Running a miniature file server –
    Allow your friends to access your files and upload files to it. You could get adventurous and allow anonymous access, but those rapscallions will probably muck about and cause problems.
  • Running a derpy little web server –
    The Raspberry Pi people have said that the processor is roughly equivalent to a Pentium II 233MHz. With 256 megs of RAM and its processor, it would be quite suitable for running a hobby website from home. Since it uses so little power as to not even warrant a heatsink, you could leave it on for days.
  • Using it as a dev board –
    There are all sorts of things sticking out of the side of this board that you’re supposed to solder together or use for pitch bending.
  • Somehow replacing MacTV or whatever the shit it is called –
    Yeah, I don’t know anything about this, but felt that the list needed another bullet point to flesh it out.

pi chart

I whipped up a pie chart to represent the amount of pie in the pie chart.

Although the Raspberry Pi is really appealing to everyone, it may not be a device that suits your needs. Since bullet lists are smashing, let’s have a proper display, shall we?

  • Atom dual core computer –
    You could put together a dual core Atom computer with 4 gigs of RAM and a 32GB SSD for about 230 dollars. This would be much more powerful and capable of functioning as a game server. However, it will have a much larger power draw than the Raspberry Pi.
  • NAS –
    Buffalo has some good RAID NASes in the 200 dollar range that would allow you to safely back up all of your legitimate files, and schedule backups. They come with all of the web interfaces all set up, which is pretty rad…I mean, charver dolescum, straight from the bailey.
  • Netbook –
    A netbook is like a computer, only weaker. It is, however, much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi, and comes with a big hard drive, small monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and in some pretentious cases, a glowing Apple. The biggest draw of a netbook has to be the battery, which gives you plenty of hours of Game of Thrones for long plane rides.
    I even run Killing Floor off of my 1.6GHz 1gig of memory craptop.
    Shitsnack netbooks are capable of outputting high definition video, but the wimpy CPU/GPU have a hard time with anything compressed. Any higher resolution video in mp4 format gives plenty of green artifacts, and MKV files make it have an aneurism, barely outputting the audio, yet alone the video. Until I get my hands on a Raspberry Pi, I cannot speak on how well the GPU works in comparison to a netbook, but they are supposed to be capable of 1080p HD, which is just about what a netbook can do.
    You can find some good ASUS netbooks for around 240 dollars, decent Samsungs for 220, or flimsy Acers, for 200. All of these prices are the 6-cell models.

That’s it. That’s the stupid follow-up to the Raspberry Pi, which I still don’t own.
You’re probably going to have a lot of time on your hands before a Raspberry Pi actually ships to you, so why not waste that time looking around this website for more wicked sweet ace information? It makes me feel brilliant when you do so. That’s the British usage of brilliant, and not the actual usage of brilliant, because I still feel pretty stupid when people read my website. Good day sir.

7 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Peripherals

  1. Thanks for the heads up, Eli. I had no clue that the Pi was so bareboned. I will now pass on purchasing this “computer” and instead look into a Atom Dual-Core with a SSD.

  2. 5 dollars for shipping in America is pushing the total cost of this unit (power cord, network cable, SD card) closer towards 55 dollars. Still cheap, but rapidly becoming less impressive. Netbook prices are all inflated due to hard drive prices going up after the floods in SE Asia, so the Raspberry Pi still seems like an OK deal, but everything is rapidly becoming so unappealing due to the rise in costs.
    Thanks for the perspective, mate (the only British slang I know)

  3. Everybody I know has requested information, and nobody I know has received an actual device. It seems like the people that put this together had no idea that releasing the CHEAPEST COMPUTER ON THE MARKET would end up being popular.

  4. I just read that The Pirate Bay is thinking about sending these little guys into the upper atmosphere to beat terrestrial copyright laws. That’s so sci-fi and awesome at the same time.
    Pi in the sky, derp derp.

  5. It seems like you aren’t giving the Raspberry Pi a fair shake. It’s only real competition is the Pogo Plug, which is priced substantially higher than the Raspberry Pi. Most of the target market will already have all of the extras (SD card, keyboard) laying around, keeping the price around 35 dollars.

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  7. I bought everything I needed to operate the Raspberry Pi shortly after it was announced. Now I have about 30 dollars of cords that I cannot use. 🙁
    Curse this Pi, curse it.

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