Introduction

Raspberry Pi is a sequence of small single-board computers (SBC’s) developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the United Kingdom (UK). It was originally developed to encourage children at school to learn basic computer science skills.

It is widely used in many areas because of its low cost, open design and modularity.

There are three main series and several upgrades of Raspberry Pi, they are:

1. Raspberry Pi - This SBC’s features a Broadcom system on a chip (SoC) with an integrated ARM compatible CPU (Central Processing Unit) and on-chip GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
2. Raspberry Pi Zero - This features reduced input/output (I/O) and general purpose I/O (GPIO) competence.
3. Raspberry Pi Pico - This features a RP2040 SoC with an Integrated ARM compatible CPU (Central Processing Unit)

Since our topic is related to OpenCV we will be using the latest version of Raspberry Pi that is Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B contains ARM Cortex-A72 64-bit processor that runs on 1.5GHz, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, dual HDMI ports.

There used to be memory capacities of 1GB version but it has been abandoned now there are only three versions 2GB, 4GB and 8GB versions and there prices have been decreased. The Pi 4 also has USB-C port which adds additional power to the downstream peripherals.

It is recommended to use the Raspberry Pi 4 B or the newer versions because if we use the older version the time it will take to install OpenCV will increase drastically since the older versions have low processing power than the newer versions.

It is also recommended to use newer Windows version like Windows 10 or 11 previous windows versions like 7,8 XP would also take more time having the same above reason.

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi