Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Official Raspberry Pi mini-computer user guide is coming, but where’s the actual unit?

By
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you are one of the first people to receive the initial batches of the $25 or $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computers, you may be excited to find that the makers of the product will soon launch an official guidebook to help you make the most use out of the cheap chips. The user manual aims to help everyone from total beginners to coding kings learn more about programming Raspberry Pi regardless of their technical knowledge — a vision Raspberry Pi makers had always envisioned by creating such an affordable computer.

Put together by Eden Upton and Gareth Halfacree and published by Wiley & Sons, inside the book you will find various projects ranging in difficulty levels. Learn anything from basic tasks such as getting the computer to recognize SD cards to setting Raspberry Pi up for media entertainment centers or building a robot. For those afraid of even the simplest tasks, the book will also cover extremely beginner’s checklists, such as knowing where to attach an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor — items you will have to provide on your own.

Recommended Videos

Of course, for more advanced users, this book isn’t purely just for obvious guides. The more technologically-apt can also read on to learn more about programming in Scratch and Python as well as non-computer skills such as how to solder. If you don’t think you need all this information, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also aims to release a condensed version of the first six chapters in the book to help you get started while saving a bit of cash.

The official Raspberry Pi user guide will be released in the United States and United Kingdom in both e-book and paperback versions. You can pre-order yours today for $20 from Barnes & Noble, or £11.70 Amazon UK. No official launch date has been announced just yet, and the cover art may change, but given the simplicity of Raspberry Pi itself, we won’t expect anything more fancy than what’s already mocked up.

In the meantime, we’re still hoping to get our hands on one of the unit, if at all. Ever since its launch back in late February, the hot-ticket item has been so hard to get an order on that by the time we receive a unit, all the projects might be freely available via YouTube tutorials. Some great ideas we’ve seen so far include setting up an in-home security system, building an arcade emulator, and programming it to control your home light switches. Perhaps you can even combine Raspberri Pi with ifttt technology to really get things totally remote and automated. What do you think we’ll receive first: the user guide or the computer unit itself?

Editors’ Recommendations

Natt Garun
Natt Garun
Former Digital Trends Contributor
An avid gadgets and Internet culture enthusiast, Natt Garun spends her days bringing you the funniest, coolest, and strangest…
On my son’s behalf, I sought out the smart glasses that ‘give sight to the blind’
A prototype of the Soliddd Vision smart glasses.

Like many 4-year-olds, there's nothing my son loves more than cars. Despite my own complete lack of interest in the topic, he can already identify make and model of cars from across the street with uncanny accuracy, spurred on by his growing collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels.

But as we've had to explain to him, we still don't know if he'll be ever to drive one himself. The brain tumor that he was born with left him with stunted vision, particularly in one eye, with little hope of improvement.

Read more
The RTX 5060 will be Nvidia’s most important GPU, and I’m worried about it
Two graphics cards sitting on top of each other.

Nvidia just finished revealing its range of new RTX 50-series GPUs, the first of which will arrive in just a couple of weeks. They're some of the best graphics cards ever made, according to Nvidia, and for the flagship RTX 5090 that clocks in at $2,000, I believe the company. Lower down the stack, however, I'm concerned.

For the past couple of years, there's been a growing issue surrounding graphics cards with 8GB of VRAM, which is something we've seen on full display with games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Despite backlash in the previous generation concerning releases like the RTX 4060 Ti, I'm worried that Nvidia will repeat the mistakes of the past when the RTX 5060 inevitably rolls around.
It'll be popular

Read more
ChatGPT just dipped its toes into the world of AI agents
OpenAI's ChatGPT blog post is open on a computer monitor, taken from a high angle.

OpenAI appears to be just throwing spaghetti at this point, hoping it sticks to a profitable idea. The company announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out a new feature called ChatGPT Tasks to subscribers of its paid tier that will allow users to set individual and recurring reminders through the ChatGPT interface.

Tasks does exactly what it sounds like it does: It allows you to ask ChatGPT to do a specific action at some point in the future. That could be assembling a weekly news brief every Friday afternoon, telling you what the weather will be like in New York City tomorrow morning at 9 a.m., or reminding you to renew your passport before January 20. ChatGPT will also send a push notification with relevant details. To use it, you'll need to select "4o with scheduled tasks" from the model picker menu, then tell the AI what you want it to do and when.

Read more