Date: March 8, 2019

The technology today has become very advanced. When I was young, it is a tough job to get hold of a “computer”. You need to build yourself a PC. And it is not cheap. Every month, you need to save up to buy this card, that card, that PCI interface, etc etc.

Nowadays, they make it so easy for the students.

This is the latest Raspberry Pi 4. It comes with 4Gb RAM. It is the most advanced Raspberry Pi. Not cheap as it is slightly shy from $100.

It comes with USB-C port.

And as it is a development board, you can basically attached whatever onto the board. Here, I attached my 3.5 inch LCD monitor which comes in a case.

To power it up, you can use a portable battery that can do 2.1A output. It is good enough, although the specs says it needs 2.5A.

Next, the problem is, you need a bigger monitor. The 3.5″ is a good thing to have, not necessary, but the screen is just too small. So, the best thing to do is to use VNC to login to the Raspberry Pi 4 desktop (I.e. Raspbian OS).

And guess what? IPad Pro can install VNC client. So, make sure you run the VNC server on the raspberry Pi 4, and use your iPad Pro to connect to that.

To do so, you need a network, as you need to know what is the IP address the Raspberry Pi has. So, I uses a Huawei WiFi Dongle with Singtel sim chips.

As a result, you have a “workstation” where the RP4 (Raspberry Pi 4) is your server. You can run mail server, web server, chat server, Minecraft server on your RP4. It is something you carry with you at all time, so that you can do work, play games, etc. You can install retro games on it. You can use their Open Office, which is compatible with Microsoft office, etc. Best of all, you can do some programming using Python, C, C++, Java or Scratch. You can install sensors and play with the sensors too. There are so much thing you can could do with it.

Let’s boot up. And it works, the small screen shows the entire desktop. The touch sensor needs to be calibrate though. Hahahaha

Installation is not hard.

You don’t have to have the small screen. I installed it because I want to see actions from my RP4.

See, I told you, you can write small simple games using Python. And run it over the VNC connection. VNC is a Remote Desktop software. It actually mirror the output of your RP4 desktop onto your VNC client software on iPad Pro. Of course, you can run the VNC client anywhere, even on iMac, MacBook, PC or laptop. The key thing is to interact with your RP4.

This game demo is written using Pygame wrapper which uses Python.

So, now I can carry a sort of powerful enough server with me. I can interact it with my iPad Pro that comes with keyboard.

I love my RP4. My kids is having badminton training now. So, I got 4 hours to burn. So, this is what I do when I got so much free time. Playing with my RP4. Hahahahaha