When we think of budget computers, we envision a price tag somewhere in the AED 800 to AED 1500 range. Raspberry Pi has upped the ante when it comes to low cost computers by retailing their latest single board computer for $5.
Now don’t expect to be playing Fallout 4 on 60FPS on Raspberry Pi’s new computer, it’s targeted mostly towards makers who are building connected devices as well as those doing robotic projects.
“We really hope this is going to get those last few people in the door and involved in computer programming.”
– Pi co-founder Eben Upton
The next cheapest Pi in the family is the Model A+ which costs $20. While this fall a Raspberry Pi rival/clone, called Orange Pi, also popped up, retailing for $15 so there’s no doubt that low cost computers are getting increasingly affordable.
Whether $5 is the utmost bottom for a single board computer remains to be seen — Upton suggests this is as low as things can go for the foreseeable future at least. And there’s no doubt $5 is an incredible price for a fully fledged computer which will run applications like Minecraft Pi and the Scratch visual programming language.
So what does a $5 Pi get you, hardware wise? A 1Ghz core chip — in fact the same chip that was used in the original Raspberry Pi but upclocked to run a bit faster — and 512MB of RAM, plus on the ports front: a micro-SD card slot, a mini-HDMI and two micro-USB ports.
The full specs run-down is as follows:
- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
- 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
- 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
- A micro-SD card slot
- A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
- Micro-USB sockets for data and power
- An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
- Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
- An unpopulated composite video header
Unfortuantely there’s no Ethernet or on-board Wi-Fi but clearly components had to be sacrificed to keep the costs low. You could circumnavigate that by using the micro-USB port to plug in a Wi-Fi dongle to get it connected.
Using smaller sockets, keeping the components on one side of the board and having a very small form factor (the board is just 65mm x 30mm x 5mm) are other ways the board designers have shaved costs. That and economies of scale — having manufactured millions of the computers over the past several years. Plus of course the Pi Foundation is a not-for-profit.
