Computer Skills for Research
Inexpensive Linux Computer: Raspberry Pi
By Mark Ciotola
First published on October 10, 2019. Last updated on October 11, 2019.
What if you need Unix or Linux, but don’t have a computer or only have a Windows computer (that you don’t want to mess with)?
You can buy a Raspberry Pi computer for about US $35. The Raspberry Pi (or simply Pi) runs Linux and also comes with a graphical user interface (GUI). It probably won’t run heavy graphics video games, but it will run many useful programs and can be extremely useful for research programming.
The downside is that the US $35 only includes the computer itself. You need to supply a monitor, keyboard, mouse and power supply. Sometimes old keyboards and monitors, etc. will work with the Pi. Sometimes you can buy these things as part of an inexpensive package or order a small monitors and keyboard (which is what the author did), for a total of about US $100 for everything.
Resources
- Raspberry Pi organization
- Adafruit (commercial vendor)
- Sparkfun (commercial vendor)