Raspberry Pi 4 Computer Desktop Kit: Good For Beginners

Tickling the fancy of tinkerers, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny circuit board with memory, a CPU, and several I/O connectors.

- Tom Brant

It offers anyone access to the building blocks of computer programming—from making an app to controlling a hobbyist robot—for the price of a good dinner. The newest model, the Raspberry Pi 4, still promises all of this, but it adds the tantalizing possibility of serving as a basic desktop PC with minimal setup effort, in the form of the Raspberry Pi 4 Computer Desktop Kit. At $120, the Desktop Kit, which includes an upgraded version of the Pi 4 board, is much pricier than a Pi board on its own (they start at $35). It delivers good value, though, and gets Pi first-timers up and running quickly. But persistent quirks mean it’s still not a realistic substitute for an actual PC. Prospective buyers who have used Pi before and own the supporting accoutrements will be better off getting the Pi 4 board by itself.

DESIGN

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the same basic size and shape as all of its Model B predecessors, though significantly bigger than the Model A and Zero versions. It’s a 2.2-by-3.4-inch rectangle, and its various components stick up about 0.6-inch tall. Among those components are a Broadcom quad-core processor running at 1.5GHz, four USB Type-A ports, two micro HDMI video outputs, a gigabit Ethernet port, and radios for 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0.

These are recognizable specs to people shopping for a new laptop or desktop to use as their main computer. But other unique aspects to the Raspberry Pi 4 hint at its true identity as a building block for tinkerers and makers.

The first is the General Purpose Input-Output (GPIO) header, a versatile 40-pin connector that can power and communicate with virtually anything you might want to create, from a DIY weather station to a motor for a small robot. All of its uses require a fair amount of tinkering to write code and attach hardware like sensors and lights. Taming the GPIO connector is far outside the consumer-PC use case.