You can use Scratch, the drag and drop flowchart programming language for young children to read and write to the gpio ports. My son did an elementary school science fair project with it.
A few years later I pulled out the same Pi and used it with Scratch to make a temporary cat litter box alarm when I needed a urine sample for the vet. I use esp32s for my projects but using the Pi took minutes instead of hours program.
What? You said it having 1GB of memory makes it an easier to program microcontroller. I’m just trying to figure out how that makes sense. The amount of memory doesn’t matter when programming it.
A typical microcontroller like a Raspberry Pico ESP32, or Arduino has 520K of RAM. Not Megabytes but Kilobytes. There’s no OS. There are no drivers. There’s no sound or video output. You run a development environment on your pc, it compiles the code to byte code and then you transfer that data to the rom built into the microcontroller using the development environment because in most cases the Microcontroller flash isn’t visible to Windows/Mac/Linux as a fat drive.
Using a 1GB Pi as a microcontroller means you boot Linux, run Scratch/Python, C, type your code, and test it dynamically. You have video and audio out available. You are running a single simple program that would otherwise run on a 200 Mhz CPU with 520k ram. So a 2.4Ghz Pi with 1 Gigabyte ram is gigantic in comparison making development much easier.
You can use Scratch, the drag and drop flowchart programming language for young children to read and write to the gpio ports. My son did an elementary school science fair project with it.
A few years later I pulled out the same Pi and used it with Scratch to make a temporary cat litter box alarm when I needed a urine sample for the vet. I use esp32s for my projects but using the Pi took minutes instead of hours program.
Can’t you do all that with a 4 or 8GB version?
Yes for more money. Why buy an 8GB Pi5 instead of a 16GB?
What? You said it having 1GB of memory makes it an easier to program microcontroller. I’m just trying to figure out how that makes sense. The amount of memory doesn’t matter when programming it.
A typical microcontroller like a Raspberry Pico ESP32, or Arduino has 520K of RAM. Not Megabytes but Kilobytes. There’s no OS. There are no drivers. There’s no sound or video output. You run a development environment on your pc, it compiles the code to byte code and then you transfer that data to the rom built into the microcontroller using the development environment because in most cases the Microcontroller flash isn’t visible to Windows/Mac/Linux as a fat drive.
Using a 1GB Pi as a microcontroller means you boot Linux, run Scratch/Python, C, type your code, and test it dynamically. You have video and audio out available. You are running a single simple program that would otherwise run on a 200 Mhz CPU with 520k ram. So a 2.4Ghz Pi with 1 Gigabyte ram is gigantic in comparison making development much easier.