Looking forward to learn python as a hobby and I came across this “computer?”, regardless if it’s useful with python what exactly is a raspberry pi and how is it useful? If it could be explained in simple terms that would be fantastic, I literally know nothing about coding or python.
Also if you could suggest a coding language that would be suitable for math i’d appreciate it since i’m looking to code something related with math since i love math (maybe i could start with a script/program that could resolve integers or maybe graph functions or anything of that matter)
Thanks.
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it’s basically a whole computer on a single small circuit board. they’re useful because they’re small, cheap and easy to connect to other devices / sensors – USB (general connection), HDMI (video sound), various pins allow for connections. coding on the raspberry pi means having access to these connections and being able to use it as the computing heart of all sorts of projects.
It’s a small computer.
The general idea is that there are lots of project that require small computers with easily accessible ports. A Raspberry Pi is small and inexpensive in comparison to other computers, making it very useful for a variety of applications.
Python is a good general-purpose computing language. It’s relatively easy to understand and can be used for a variety of purposes.
However, depending on the specific kind of math you’re interested in, there are better languages more well-suited to your purposes. R comes to mind as a language designed to be easy for statistical problems and graphics.
A Raspberry Pi is a small, cheap, low-power computer. You probably think of a computer as a big bulky thing that comes in a metal case and has a bunch of other stuff on it, but fundamentally the heart of the computer is the actual processor, input/output connections, and memory (all of which are hard-wired onto the Pi). You can then hook those connections up to other things, like a monitor or a mouse or a USB drive, or whatever.
The idea of the Pi is that it’s so small and low cost that you can use it in places you wouldn’t use a full computer with all its peripherals. For example, you could temporarily hook it up to a keyboard and monitor to program it, then disconnect it from both and just hook it up to a water sensor and a mechanical water spigot to let it auto-water your garden for you. Or you could hook it up to some wheels in a lego car to let it drive around. Things like that.
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Python is a popular language for doing mathematical work because a few important mathematical libraries – numpy, scikit-learn, and pandas – are available for it, which allow you to do pretty powerful mathematical work with relatively little manual labor. It’s one of the two big languages used for data science; the other is R (which is more focused on statistics).
If you want to do specifically mathematical programming, Maple or MatLab are the two big pure-math programming tools.
It is a computer, no quotemarks needed. It’s a very small one (about the size of a credit card), and has a different architecture than a PC or Mac, but it can run various versions of Linux. The current version comes with various amounts of RAM (from 1GB to 8GB), can boot off a microSD card or an external USB drive, has two HDMI outputs, and can be powered by a (albeit powerful) cellphone charger.
You can use them to learn Python just as well as any other Linux-based computer, or, frankly, any other computer.
Now, normally one of the biggest advantages of a Raspberry PI is that they’re _super_ cheap — starting at $35.
However, they are _impossible to find_ right now and are selling for a _hell_ of a lot more than the MSRP. Sadly, as amazing as I personally think these devices are, right now is a terrible time to try and find one ):
A raspberry pi is just a brand of computers made by the raspberry pi company. They share specific characteristics such as: being single board computers (all the essential parts are attached to a single PCB); very small; ARM based CPU (like in your phone); low power consumption.
These characteristics make it ideal for uses where cost, portability, power consumption etc are important but computer power is not.
>Also if you could suggest a coding language that would be suitable for math i’d appreciate it since i’m looking to code something related with math since i love math
Really depends what you mean by “suitable for math”. All programming languages are maths at heart and can be used for maths, though some are specialised in certain ways, eg mathmatica and maple are designed specifically for solving mathematical problems, MATLAB is designed for matrix manipulation, fortran is designed for numerical computation. Python is good though because it has libraries for everything, eg symbolab is for doing maths kind of like mathmatic and maple, numpy is for working with matrices like MATLAB, matplotlib is good for making plots and graphs.
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