Reflection of class on Oct 25th

 When I first heard about the Raspberry Pi 3 from you, I was greatly shocked by it because I didn’t think a computer could be integrated and hold in a little box which had the same size as a credit card, that is, computer is one of the most complex machine that includes so many embedded precision devices till now.

  But the Raspberry Pi 3 was a real micro-computer indeed after I successfully assembled it with provided components and installed the corresponding Raspian OS on it and got the feedback from the external monitor. Although it couldn’t be used as my Mac which had more functions, I really liked it because it helped me a lot on understanding what the computer architecture was.

  As I can see, there are a motherboard which includes kinds of integrated circuit, a chip as a CPU for operating and controlling the whole computer, a GPIO for data exchange, a microSD card slot for holding a microSD card as a hard drive which includes the original OS, 4 USB ports for connecting external devices like keyboard and mouse, an Ethernet port and WiFi module for connecting with the Internet, a Bluetooth module for connecting with dedicated external Bluetooth devices like wireless headphone, a headphone port for exporting audio, a HDMI port for connecting with monitor and exporting high quality media signal, a micro USB port for charging. As a summary, these different fundamental modules formed a complete computer which is designed as Von Neumann’s theory about the architecture of computer and used to input or receive information, process information, store information, output or distributing the processed information.

  All these modules are called hardware like the physical body of computer, and the real mind of computer is called software which based on an essential Raspian operating system that I had an overview on class. Of course, the Raspian OS which is based on the open sourced OS called Linux is much more simple than Windows or Mac OS because it’s just for learner in the first stage on logical programming like me.

  I opened the IDLE for Python 3 and did relative operations on it by following the content of book such as fundamental arithmetical operations, storing information by using variables and displaying text contents on screen. Actually these operations were not difficult for me to exercise because I had learnt some similar language on programing like C and Visual Basic so I tried to do some other things with my Raspberry Pi. And the problem came soon immediately that I found the system could not display Chinese characters and support Chinese input. Fortunately, I solved this problem by searching corresponding solutions on the Internet and shared it to my classmates.

  Well, you can see, it’s a really meaningful class for me!