Hello, How are you going? my name is Sam from Core Electronics and today we’re going to be taking a look at Latte Panda versus Raspberry Pi. Now its a topic that has been gaining a bit of traction and I thought it was time we took these guys head to head and dressed some of the differences in a bit more detail.

Now everyone knows Raspberry Pi, if you’re watching this video then I’m sure the name Raspberry Pi has been mentioned to you at least once or twice and simply put it is the worlds most popular micro computer. It is a single board computer and it has everything you need to run a fully fledged desktop version of Linux or other distributions, it’s great. We love it and it’s awesome. But there is a new guy on the block called the Latte Panda which is another single board computer - there is quite a lot coming out now, but what makes the Latte Panda so interesting is it has an onboard Arduino chip. Not only that but it is capable of running the full version of Widows 10 - the fully fledged desktop version and it packs quite a punch. It’s got a 1.8 GHz Atom Cherry Trail processor, I believe, and you can get it in 2 and 4 GB memory variance so there is quite a lot going on under here compared to the 1.2 GHz 1GB Raspberry Pi. It can run Windows 10 IoT Core but really it’s not like Windows 10, it’s a developer bare bones iot edition designed for terminal use and it’s great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not desktop Windows 10 as you know it which is what the Latte Panda brings.

Now first of all, its a little unfair to directly compare these two boards because they are so different, you’ve got one running ARM Cortex architecture and one running Intel ATOM architecture, they’ve got two different price points as well. The Latte Panda is designed for makers and it’s affordable whereas the latte Panda is a little more expensive but you do get what you pay for and again the operating systems are so different. You can put Windows Apps on it, you can put games, you can put anything that you would have on a traditional computer. Whereas with Raspberry Pi it is a little bit different, it’s a Linux Distribution which if you’re not familiar with it, it can take a little bit of time to get used to.

So lets take a look (with that in mind of course) at some of the specs that these boards are packing, number of peripherals and data that they can crunch.

So the Latte Panda brings to the table, as I was saying 1.8 GHz Quad Core Intel Atom Cherry Trail Processor, 2 and 4 GB RAM Variance. It’s got 32 GB and 64 GB depending on what model you go with of on board storage and that’s very important to note because the Raspberry Pi has no on board storage and we’ll get to that in a moment. It has, as you would expect USB 2, USB 3 - very important, HDMI, ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, all of the usual culprits you usually find on single board computers these days. But it also has the LCD display and the touch connections which is something the Raspberry Pi lacks along with these headers here for the Arduino Board. It’s an ATMega32U4 chip on board. You can see here this board coproduced with DFRobot and DFRobot have a lot of sensor modules which use 3Y interface for analogue and digital sensors and you can see those headers ready to go here. It does also have a smaller header to make sure you don’t accidentally connect to it which you can use the GPIO pins on the Intel processor for if you want to go directly the heart of what is powering your computer. More complex to use and certainly alot more to it than the Arduino but the option is there if you want that fantastic device for putting on quadcopters and GPS navigators, things that will crunch a lot of data and use a lot of math functions.

So, the Raspberry Pi, you probably know all about the Raspberry Pi - if not check out our ‘What is Raspberry Pi’ tutorial.  But for a quick overview as we were saying it has a quad core 1.2 GHz Cortex Processor with the Broadcom SOC there. it’s got 1 GB of RAM which is shared across the CPU and GPU Cores. You’ve got Micro SD card only for storage which is important. The Micro SD card slot is just there and it has no on board storage so if you take the SD card out of one Raspberry Pi and put it into another its like it was the same machine and any overclock settings, any config settings, any programs, it’s all read off the SD card which is really cool. It’s Linux and its only got USB 2 but it also features ethernet, Bluetooth, WiFi, a CSI connector which is a Camera Serial Interface, an LCD and the GPIO Pins. Pretty cool, pretty cool.

Now which one is going to be best for your project, your application, well, it depends, it really does depend. Do you want to use Linux, do you want to use Terminal, do you want to get used to all of the nuances that make up Linux? If so the Raspberry Pi is going to be great. If on the other hand you love Arduino and you also love the idea of the computer that can fit into your pocket then the LattePanda is the go to. It’s dead easy to set up, bear in mind though that the LattePandas no longer come with product key for Windows 10, they do come preinstalled with Windows 10 though which means you can use the non-activated version which has all the same features, a couple of slight roadblocks which haven’t bothered us yet but the Arduino is so easy to use, you just open up the preinstalled IDE, select the Leonardo Board and you’ve got programming. On board are LED and all the rest that you would expect from an Arduino Board and it makes using GPIO Pins so much easier because with the Raspberry Pi you can’t directly access those Pins like you can with an Arduino chip - it’s so easy to write directly to registers with Atmel chips but with the Raspberry Pi you have to sift through their software layers in order to write to them, in Python code or Terminal - whatever it may be.

So I guess they’re the key differences and you can check out some of the board layouts and what they each have going for them but it really just depends what you’re comfortable with and whether you consider the price point of the LattePanda to be worth the extra features - for example it has WiFi Antenna connectors so you can really boost that range whereas the Pi doesn’t. it’s got all these different things going for it - both have headphone jacks for example. Whether you think that on board Arduino is going to make your life a whole lot easier and save having an extra board or whether you want to get down with Linux, it’s up to you. Thats a bit of a head to head, again its a little unfair because of the differences in architecture, operating systems, specs - you know the LattePanda may have more power but it needs that to power the extra juice that Windows 10 requires whereas Linux is a much simpler, low powered distribution it is still quite capable, so bit of give and take. Decide for yourself, you can pick one up at our store and I’d love to see some awesome projects with the LattePanda especially - we haven’t seen too many of those being such a new board. So if you’re loving it get the conversation started in the comments below.

I’m Sam and you’re watching another Core Electronics tutorial and I’ll see you next time :-)