The Monday Jolt is a column about microcontrollers and electronics that appears in MAKE every Monday morning.
Credit: Frank Carver
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a single board any more, there are a growing number of different variants available. Unfortunately they all look rather similar, and sometimes it can be important which board is which. Fortunately there are a number of ways to figure out which board you have. One easy method is to type the following on the command line,
cat /proc/cpuinfo
which should get you something that looks a lot like this,
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l) BogoMIPS : 697.95 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xb76 CPU revision : 7 Hardware : BCM2708 Revision : 000f Serial : 00000000d298cfc1
This tells us the revision code (0x0f) of the board, and from that, and the excellent work that Frank Carver has done compiling a list of what those revision codes mean, we can tell than my board is a Revision 2 Model B with; 512MB RAM, Ethernet, two USB sockets, five LEDs, mounting holes, Pin3=GPIO1, Pin5=GPIO2, Pin13=GPIO27, 12C-1, 8 extra IO pads (P5).
Interestingly, since each manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi has been assigned a unique revision number I can also tell that my board was made by Qisda, who have manufacturing sites in China, Mexico and Taiwan. Since it’s written on the board, I know my board was made in China, so it must have been manufactured in Suzhou.
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