After a loooooong wait, my pi-top CEED has finally arrived and is on my desk.
When I first opened the box for the pi-top CEED, I was a little nervous. I am a computer user – not a hardware tinkerer.
There in front of me was a box of parts. Yikes.
So I opened the instructions and started reading. Amazingly, in just a few steps I had the little magnetic feet clipped on the Raspberry pi breadboard and the board connected via the existing HDMI cable.
The breadboard has four USB connections and a plug-in for an Ethernet cable. The USB ports were very difficult to connect to and that made the breadboard jiggle a little. The only thing holding it in place are the four little plastic feet with a tiny (but powerful) magnets.
When I was trying to plug a USB cable for a keyboard into the port the magnets came loose, thus making the breadboard less securely held in place. I plan to get a tiny tube of glue and place a dab of glue on the magnets to get them to stay in the plastic feet.
Although the Raspberry Pi has gained lots of attenbtion, the cool thing about the pi-top CEED is that it has a monitor included in the package. For about $100 you can have a desktop computer.
The pi-top CEED is a funky little computer. The heart (brains?) of this machine is a Raspberry pi 3 breadboard that uses the Linux operating system and within 20 minutes of me opening the box of parts, I had the computer assembled and running.
It was an empowering feeling to take a box of parts and within a few minutes have a functioning computer on my desk!
As soon as I have had a chance to play with the pi-top CEED I will write more about the user experience.