Raspberry Pi ...

[Carol Haynes]

Got my Raspberry Pi this morning. Not sure what I am going to do with it but it looks like a bit of fun.

I was a bit surprised to see it arrive with absolutely no documentation - not even a single side of A5 with a diagram explaining the ports. Most are obvious but there are a couple of ribbon headers on the board which look interesting - off to the forums to see if anyone can enlighten me further.

[4wd]

I'm on the list for mine, got an email saying the first 4000 people can order theirs - unfortunately I wasn't included 

Ribbon header is for GPIO, (General Purpose Input/Output), like the Arduino - so you can hook up sensors, switches, etc.

[Carol Haynes]

There is a second single row of pins that don't seem to be documented at all - they don't even appear on the circuit layout on the website.

[4wd]

There's the double row header connection which is the GPIO and there is also two rows for JTAG^w communication.

The JTAG is used for test access, hardware/firmware debugging and firmware loading - not something the average user of the board will be doing.


Pic from Wikipedia.

On the schematics for the Rev.B, one row is used for the LAN controller, (connector P3, sheet 2, ref A4), and the other is for the CPU/GPU and is connector P2, sheet 4, ref G2.

Unless you specifically want to bang the hardware directly, there's not much point in worrying about them.

On a side note, the choices are hotting up: Raspberry Pi faces challenge from Android-based rivals