Book Image

Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition

By : Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Tim Cox
Book Image

Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition

By: Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Tim Cox

Overview of this book

Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers – Third Edition begins by guiding you through setting up Raspberry Pi 3, performing tasks using Python 3.6, and introducing the first steps to interface with electronics. As you work through each chapter, you will build your skills and apply them as you progress. You will learn how to build text classifiers, predict sentiments in words, develop applications using the popular Tkinter library, and create games by controlling graphics on your screen. You will harness the power of a built in graphics processor using Pi3D to generate your own high-quality 3D graphics and environments. You will understand how to connect Raspberry Pi’s hardware pins directly to control electronics, from switching on LEDs and responding to push buttons to driving motors and servos. Get to grips with monitoring sensors to gather real-life data, using it to control other devices, and viewing the results over the internet. You will apply what you have learned by creating your own Pi-Rover or Pi-Hexipod robots. You will also learn about sentiment analysis, face recognition techniques, and building neural network modules for optical character recognition. Finally, you will learn to build movie recommendations system on Raspberry Pi 3.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


The chip at the heart of the original Raspberry Pi (a Broadcom BCM2835 processor) was originally designed to be a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) for mobile and embedded applications. The ARM core that drives most of Raspberry Pi's functionality was added because some extra space was available on the chip; this enabled this powerful GPU to be used as a System-on-Chip (SoC) solution.

An SoC is an integrated service microchip with all the necessary electronic circuits and parts of a computer or electronic system, it is used in smartphones or wearable computers, on a single integrated circuit (IC).

As you can imagine, if that original ARM core (ARM1176JZF-S, which is the ARMv6 architecture) consisted of only a small part of the chip on Raspberry Pi, you would be right in thinking that the GPU must perform rather well.

Note

The processor at the heart of Raspberry Pi 3 has been upgraded (to a Broadcom BCM2837 processor); it now contains four ARM cores (Cortex A53 ARMv8A), each of which...