In this chapter, we will take a quick look at the Raspberry Pi hardware and some of the software that will be used both in this project and the majority of others throughout this book.

As the Pi was based on hardware that was to be included in embedded or portable electronics (such as smartphones and tablets), it has a few extra hardware features that are not found on a typical desktop or laptop PC, one of which is the General Purpose Input and Output (GPIO) header. This is a set of pins (26 on the model A and B, and 40 on the model B+) that allows you to communicate with external hardware such as GPS sensors, accelerometers, and motors through programming languages such as Python, C, and C++. When we get further in this chapter, we will take a look at a little trick that can be done to turn one of these pins into an FM radio transmitter.