The Raspberry Pi is a small, inexpensive computer built on a single circuit board, roughly the size of a credit card. Unlike a microcontroller board such as an Arduino, the Pi is a full computer: it boots a complete operating system, runs a desktop, connects to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and can be used for general-purpose computing as well as hardware projects. The official software, Raspberry Pi OS, is described in the project’s documentation as “the official operating system (OS) for Raspberry Pi computers,” a Linux distribution tuned for the hardware and free to use.
The Pi was created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which describes itself as “an independent charity with the global mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.” The motivation was educational: its founders were concerned that fewer young people were arriving at university with hands-on programming and tinkering experience, and they wanted a cheap, robust machine that a child could experiment with, break, and reprogram without fear of damaging an expensive family computer. The first model went on sale in early 2012 and sold out almost immediately, far exceeding the modest expectations of a charity project.
A defining feature of the board is its GPIO header, a row of general-purpose input/output pins, standardized at 40 pins on modern models, that the documentation presents as “GPIO and the 40-pin header.” These pins let the Pi sense and control external electronics directly: reading buttons and sensors, lighting LEDs, and driving motors. The Foundation’s documentation shows controlling these pins from Python, noting that “using the GPIO Zero library makes it easy to control GPIO devices with Python.” This combination of a real Linux computer with accessible hardware pins is what makes the Pi equally at home as a desktop, a server, a media player, or the brain of a robotics or Internet-of-Things project.
The Foundation organizes its work around education, non-formal learning through clubs and competitions, and research into how young people learn computing. Profits from selling Pi hardware fund this charitable mission, and the product line has expanded well beyond the original board to include the tiny Pi Zero, the keyboard-integrated Pi 400, industrial Compute Modules, and the Pi Pico, a microcontroller board that sits closer to Arduino’s category. The Foundation is registered as a UK charity and operates internationally, including entities in Ireland, North America, India, and Kenya.
The Raspberry Pi’s importance lies in how thoroughly it succeeded at an educational goal while becoming a mainstream tool. It made a capable Linux computer cheap enough to be disposable, which put real computing power into classrooms, hobbyist benches, and embedded products around the world. Alongside Arduino and the BBC micro:bit, it anchored the modern wave of accessible physical computing and helped revive hands-on computer-science teaching in schools, all while demonstrating that a charity could ship a globally significant piece of hardware.