What is a Raspberry Pi?

A Raspberry Pi is a tiny and inexpensive computer on a single printed circuit board. It is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and designed to run versions of Linux. It has many different ways to connect to sensors, systems and other computers. It uses very little power and can be powered via USB. Because of these features, it is a favorite tool of engineers, developers, hackers and tech tinkeres in general.

It exists in different versions at different price points. For this project, I wanted the best Raspberry Pi I could get. So I got a used Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of ram.

Raspberry Pi Foundation website

As of early 2023, there are still some supply issues and shortages of specific Pi models.

A comparison of different Raspberry Pi models as well as some alternatives, and their suitability for running OpenCPN, can be found in this post.