A new toy to play with

A few months ago my mother gave me a new computer. This computer is not just a normal computer that sits near your desk or goes on your lap or maybe a tablet but a special computer called a Raspberry Pi.

What the Raspberry Pi is an entire computer shrunk down to a single board the size of a credit card. What makes it so special is not just the tiny size of the computer but that it was made to be easily programmed so kids can learn how to write computer programs and software.

Not only that, because it is so easy to write programmes the computer also attracts adults who want to get into the hobby of making and crafting. Custom electronics can be made and the Raspberry Pi can be used to control and react with the programs. The Raspberry Pi also has connectors so you can plug in your home made electronics to the Raspberry Pi.

What is cool about the Raspberry Pi is that it uses an easy to understand and easy to learn programming language, Python.

With the Raspberry Pi I wanted to use it for a central computer for my pinball machine and then build custom electronics as a hardware driver and signal controller.

So it could act as a backbone to how inputs are converted into signals. I decided to buy a very special chip for the Raspberry Pi. This chip is called a shift register. What a shift register does is convert a single stream of data split into 8 outputs, or to convert 8 inputs into 1 single input.