Raspberry Pi®
A Raspberry Pi® is practically a very small and simple (yet powerful) mini computer. Started by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it’s accompanied software is based of a Linux Debian distribution and accordingly named “Raspbian” – other OSs available for install, mostly Linux based, which is great and perfect for this project! I will chose one of these another distros for these Pis.
Recently the Raspberry Pi 3 came out – yes I know – but it would be a bit more expensive considering I also need a SD card for each, and being that they just came out, well…they are being overpriced off course! So I decided to start off by buying four (4) of these bad boys (Raspberry Pi 2) and play with them first. I may end up buying one (1) additional Raspberry Pi 3 and use it as the master node, especially since this model has wi-fi onboard!
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Packed with power for a little guy, it’s specs:
- 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
- 1GB RAM
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- Full HDMI port
- Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- Camera interface (CSI)
- Display interface (DSI)
- Micro SD card slot
- VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
I’m excited to finally start putting this together, and having arrived March 15 (yes, the day after Pi day! How appropriate.), I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to open them! Clearly I’ve been quite busy, so let’s do this…
Linux
A Linux based OS provides me the flexibility, control, and power of Linux/GNU utilities via the command-line. Primarily, it gives me the ability to access the unit remotely on my wireless network, allowing me to execute commands, mount drives, and see all the stored information through the Terminal. Learn more about Linux and The Linux Foundation.
The CentOS Project
A few months back the CentOS Project added support for ARM hardware architecture, which gave me more reason to go ahead and buy these four (4) Raspberry Pis to test out setting up a server and making a mini cluster environment at home.
I’ve worked with CentOS 7 before on Intel based architecture, so I’ve chose to install this distro on the Raspberry Pis as opposed to Raspbian. I’m quite curious how it will perform and though being a fairly new release, I hope it handles well and has all features from it’s base build.
Supplies
- Raspberry Pi 2 Model B – $39.99 x 4
- Anker 60W 10-Port Multi-Port USB Charger PowerPort – $39.99
- Anker [6-Pack] Premium 1ft Micro USB Cables – $9.99
- Ethernet Cable – 1FT Heavy Duty Cat6 E Cord (5-pack / Black) – $5.45
- Stack, 4 Floors Clear – $14.99
Updates
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