The CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4: A $100 Office PC and More!

Ted Needleman

Could you use another computer in your home or office? Even a low-end PC can easily run $300 or more without a monitor. If you have a spare screen, though, you can put together a very capable PC for around $100!

The secret is to use a tiny, one-board computer called Raspberry Pi, along with a complete Starter Kit from CanaKit. You can assemble it and have it up and running in just 15 to 20 minutes.

It’s in There!

The Starter Kit has everything you need for your $100 Office PC except a display. It includes all of the following:

• The 4 GB RAM model of the Raspberry PI 4B computer
• An “official” Raspberry Pi keyboard and mouse in white and red
• A 15-watt power supply with an On/Off switch
• A 32 GB MicroSD Card that contains the New Out Of the Box Software (NOOBS) installer
• Multiple operating systems, programming languages, LibreOffice, and a host of other software
• A case for the Pi
• An SD Card reader dongle (which I didn’t use)
• A cable with a Micro HDMI connector on one side (to plug into the board), and a standard HDMI connector on the other (to plug into your monitor)
• Three stick-on heat sinks, and a small fan

When you run the Raspberry Pi for hours, it gets pretty hot. The stick-on heat sink and fan keep things cool. The included booklet shows you how to put everything together and how to install the software, as well as some minor troubleshooting notes in case things go off the rails.

While we reviewed the package from CanaKit, it’s not the only supplier of these kits. Some other vendors include Vilros, Micro Center, and PiShop.US. You can also buy the individual pieces, but it will cost you about the same as the CanaKit package—possibly more when you add in shipping costs from multiple suppliers. However, if you do go the assemble-your-own route, you can purchase the microSD card with the NOOBS software already on it. This saves you the bother of creating your own boot card.

The Raspberry Pi 4B ports. Raspberrypi.org

The Raspberry Pi includes basically everything you’d get from a full-size computer, including multiple USB ports and support for dual monitors.

Here’s a look at the board’s full specs:

• Broadcom BCM2711, Quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5 GHz
• Depending on the model, a 1 GB, 2 GB or 4 GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM
• Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11 ac wireless
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports.
• Raspberry Pi standard 40 pin GPIO header (fully backward compatible with previous boards)
• Two × micro HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported)
• Two-lane MIPI CSI camera port
• Four-pole stereo audio and composite video port
• H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
• OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics
• Micro-SD card slot for loading operating system and data storage
• A 5 V DC via USB-C connector (minimum 3 A)
• A 5 V DC via GPIO header (minimum 3 A)

One thing you get on the Raspberry Pi that you don’t on most PCs is a GPIO header. This allows you to connect the Pi to a variety of peripheral boards, as well as control and sense the outside world. These features are what make the Raspberry Pi an experimenter’s dream. There are literally thousands of projects available online if you want to use the board for something other than just an office PC.

The Raspberry Pi is about the same size as a deck of playing cards. Ted Needleman

Putting It Together

When you buy the $100 kit, you don’t need anything else except a monitor with an HDMI output. You can use an older model monitor, but you’ll have to buy an additional video cable that has an HDMI plug on the computer side, and whichever input (DVI or VGA) the monitor requires.

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