Raspberry Pi 2 – Model B

Description:

The Raspberry Pi 2 is here to provide you with the same Pi as before but now with double the ram and a much faster processor. The credit-card sized computer is capable of many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and playing high-definition video and games. 

The secret sauce that makes this computer so small and powerful is the Broadcom BCM2836, an ARMv7 Quad Core Processor System-on-Chip, running at 900MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode and is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute. What’s that all mean? It means that if you plug the Raspberry Pi 2 into your HDTV, you could watch BluRay quality video, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.

The biggest change that has been enacted with the Raspberry Pi 2 is an upgrade to the main processor and an increase of ram from 512MB to 1GB. The RPi2 still utilizes a microSD card to hold your system volume meaning most Linux distributions for the Pi 2 will happily live on a 4GB microSD card but larger cards are supported. 

The Raspberry Pi 2’s four built-in USB ports provide enough connectivity for a mouse, keyboard, or anything else that you feel the RPi needs, but if you want to add even more you can still use a USB hub. Keep in mind, it is recommended that you use a powered hub so as not to overtax the on-board voltage regulator. Powering the Raspberry Pi 2 is easy, just plug any USB power supply into the micro-USB port. There’s no power button so the Pi will begin to boot as soon as power is applied, to turn it off simply remove power. The four built-in USB ports can even output up to 1.2A enabling you to connect more power hungry USB devices (This does require a 2Amp micro USB Power Supply).

On top of all that, the low-level peripherals on the Pi make it great for hardware hacking. The 0.1″ spaced 40-pin GPIO header on the Pi gives you access to 27 GPIO, UART, I²C, SPI as well as 3.3 and 5V sources. Each pin on the GPIO header is identical to its predecessor the Model B+.

Compared to the Raspberry Pi 1 it has:

• A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
• 1GB RAM

Like the (Pi 1) Model B+, it also has:

• 100 Base Ethernet
• 4 USB ports
• 40 GPIO pins
• Full HDMI port
• Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
• Camera interface (CSI)
• Display interface (DSI)
• Micro SD card slot
• VideoCore IV 3D graphics core

Additional Features:

• 700 MHz ARM11 processor
• 512 MB of RAM
• Ethernet port
• Four USB ports
• Full-size HDMI output
• Four-pole 3.5 mm jack with audio output and composite video output
• 40-pin GPIO header with 0.1″-spaced male pins that are compatible with our 2×20 stackable female headers and the female ends of our premium jumper wires.
• Camera interface (CSI)
• Display interface (DSI)
• Micro SD card slot

To use the Raspberry Pi, you will need a few additional things that are not included:What you will need
A 5 V power source with a micro USB connector. We recommend this 5 VDC 1 A wall power adapter and a USB A-to-Micro-B cable.
A microSD card with an operating system on it, which also serves as the main storage for the device. Input and output devices, such as a keyboard and monitor.