Raspberry pi 2 with Mathematica inside
A few days ago, I ordered a raspberry pi 2 ultimate starter kit set from amazon. This Sat. it was delivered to me and I immediately start to make it as a small computer for my usage.
You can see from the following picture, the little black box right of my keyboard is the Raspberry PI 2 computer.
Raspberry PI 2
The assembly process is quite easy, since I just plan to do basic things at the beginning. So the process is just to plugin in the 8GB sd card to the slot, put the motherboard in the box properly, and all is done. It is now a little cute computer.
Then we can just plug in keyboard, mouse, wifi module(which is include in the set), HDMI video cabel. The Raspberry PI will start when power on. At first, we need to install the OS like following:
Installation of Operating System
After installation, it will reboot to start. The first time will require you to do some configuration like configure locale, login options(GUI or terminal) etc. You can do whatever configuration for your tastes. After that, we can login to the system.
The main reason I bought this is that it included a pilot version of Mathematica with Raspberry PI in it. As a big fan of Mathematica, it is amazingly cheep to buy a device under $90 which contains a Mathematica(For comparison, the home edition of Mathematica I bought cost me $295).
So let us see the Raspberry PI 2 with Mathematica. :)
Starting Mathematica
Mathematica with Plot
Raspberry PI Store
Conclusion
I think Raspberry PI 2 is an excellent device for youth to explore the field of programming, which is also the target of Raspberry PI 2. The containing of Mathematica make it excellent quality and reasonable price device since I think Mathematica will teach you a lot of things other language can not. (Like higher order programming, functional programming, pattern matching etc, which are normally ignored in traditional programming education).
But since its cpu is based on the ARM architecture, and the performance of the cpu and memory is quite low, some program will not work properly on it. So I think it will not work as a fully functional computer for programmer like me. But it is still very valueable since it contains Mathemaitca, python programming languages and a lot of working example of game in it.
m00nlight 01 November 2015