The Author's Experience with the Pi Top 4

As I sat down to explore the Pi Top 4, I was excited to see if it lived up to its promise as an educational tool. The author of this article was one of the lucky recipients who had just downloaded a Python code for a lot of people who are starting out with coding. They were eager to get started and saw how easy it was to set everything up. "It's so much easier to get acquainted with it," they said, as they ran through the initial setup process.

The author noticed that the Pi Top 4 wasn't working at first, but they quickly realized that they just needed to change the port from d1 to d0. They also saw an opportunity to adjust the duration of the sleep or the buzz itself, which was a great learning experience for them and their kids. The author planned to use this device once a month at their local Boys and Girls Club, where they would bring in the foundation kit and let the kids enjoy some coding fun.

One of the highlights of the Pi Top 4 is its emphasis on education, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for other purposes. The author noted that they put a big emphasis on education when it comes to programming or the "pie top 4," but also acknowledged that it's not limited to just learning. They mentioned that they could have some fun with this device as well.

The Pi Top 4 has several features that make it an excellent educational tool. One of its standout features is its full Libre Office suite, built-in Chromium web browser, VNC viewers, and media edition of Chromium, which allows users to watch Netflix and Disney Plus on the device. The author was impressed with these features, particularly the ability to access their Mac, Windows, or Linux PC from their Raspberry Pi.

The Pi Top 4 also has a range of software pre-installed, including image editing applications like GIMP (free and open-source image editor), Minecraft PI (pre-installed game), and Open Arena (freeware version of Quake 3 Arena). The author noted that these features are a big plus for the device. System tools, such as check for updates and task manager, also come pre-installed.

The Pi Top 4 has several accessories that come with it, including a simple task manager, system tools, copying your SD card to make a backup, and help references if needed. The author was impressed with the quality of these features and how they enhance the overall experience of using the device.

As the author explored the Pi Top 4, they were able to take one of the halves off the device to see what was inside. They found that the Raspberry Pi 4 is nestled in a proprietary hat that interfaces with the O LED. The heatsink on the CPU and centrifugal fan complete the device's internal components.

The author concluded by praising the Pi Top 4 as an excellent educational tool and a great computing machine. With its built-in battery, speaker, and range of software features, it's an ideal device for students of all ages. The author wished that such devices were available when they were younger and would definitely be using them in their classroom if possible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today we're gonna be taking a look at the PI top 4 now ever since the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced this has been in development and I've been really wanting to get my hands on it it kind of fell off my radar until recently and I actually reached out to the PI top company to send one over for review so here it is PI top has been around for a while making different products for the Raspberry Pi or that incorporate the Raspberry Pi and the PI top 4 is no different it might just look like a simple Raspberry Pi case but there's actually a lot of tech built into the PI top 4 and along with the PI top I also received the foundation kit which is actually really awesome it contains these little sensor pods as they're called and it allows you to easily attach LEDs sensors and buttons and you can code from the PI top 4 to get all of this up and working and we'll also be taking a look at this but it comes with one foundation plate which allows you to easily attach all of these sensor pods to the PI top 4 alright so let's go ahead and get this out of the box this is powered by the Raspberry Pi 4 comes with a four gigabyte model installed in this awesome little case here and like I mentioned it's not just a case we have an LED up top it's got a built in battery as a built-in cooling system with a centrifugal fan and from this oh le D up top we can take a look at what's going on with the Raspberry Pi without even having to look at a screen connected over HDMI and we also have this connector on the bottom which allows us to interface with the foundation play and the sensor pods personally I think this is an awesome little setup and we'll get back to this in a second but I do want to go over the accessories that come with the PI top 4 obviously you're gonna get a little bit of documentation here really it's telling you to go over to the PI top website to find out more we also get these two connectors USB type-c 2 full-sized USB and USB type-c 2 full-sized HDMI there is a proprietary port on the side and we'll look at that in a second but it's really there to connect to the PI top screen which is sold separately it just uses USB type-c out and it will also power that monitor we also have a little baggie here with some hardware mainly GPIO extensions we got a screw driver and that looks about it I think there's a couple replacement parts in here also and finally the charging brick itself this will power the PI top 4 from wall power if you want to use it that way and it also charges the internal battery so I do have to say I really like the look here I love the color scheme they went with overall everything's really nicely packaged here we can easily access the micro SD card from this side and we also have some status LEDs plus we do have a built-in 2 watt speaker here up top we have that Oh le d-- display that'll give us some information while the pi is running there's also four buttons to navigate that interface but over on this side is where all the magic happens as you can see we have a USB type-c charger and power port the PI top display port which is a proprietary port that allows you to connect this to the PI top display which is sold separately but this unit here we'll throw video out and power to that display but just keep in mind they also include an adapter that allows you to turn this into a strictly HDMI out port there's also a micro HDMI port one USB 2.0 port two USB 3.0 ports and gigabyte Ethernet they've also included a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and we have a safe power and reset button with an LED indicator to let you know the status so real quick I did want to take a look at this o LED display I'm going to go ahead and power this on you'll just hold the power button for around two seconds it'll start booting the Raspberry Pi up and once it's booted it'll let you know by giving you the PI top logo and we can actually access a few features from this screen here so we can check out the battery percentage we can also check the status of the USB the ethernet and the Wi-Fi along with the Wi-Fi it'll give us our IP address plus they've included a CPU usage widget so we can check out all four cores here if we press the little circle button it'll go to our settings we'll just tap it twice we can enable terminal from here VNC viewer and I believe we have access to refreshing our HDMI ports in case you want to swap out from one to the other as you saw I also receive the foundation kit this is the foundation plate it's got all the ports here that we need to connect our sensor pods up and this snaps right onto the bottom of the pie top four it's actually pretty easy to do and there we have it we now have access to all of the ports we need for these little sensor pods and it comes with wire for each and personally I really like the idea of these sensor pods they're really easy to use and there's no mess of wires I mean it has one connector for each and usually if you buy a kit like this on let's say Amazon for 30 bucks comes with a hundred sensors but there's also fifty miles of wire for kids and adults alike starting out for coding I think this is a really awesome little option here they've just made it so simple to just plug these right into your PI top 4 and get started and speaking of getting started it's super simple to do I'm just using their proprietary port here over to a portable monitor with an HDMI adapter on the end just go ahead and hold that button for around two seconds it's gonna start up this does come pre-loaded with a 16 gigabyte micro sd card and PI top OS which is based on raspbian and I'm a big fan of this I've been a big fan of Pi top since the Raspberry Pi 2 I've actually done a review on a few different PI top products like the PI top seed which was for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ now since this is powered by 4 gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4 we have 4 gigs of lpddr4 ram 4 cores at 1.5 gigahertz and you could overclock because this does have a heatsink and fan built in but it will kill the battery a lot faster okay so I've just connected this to my Game Capture to make it a little easier to look at this is PI top OS running on the PI top 4 very reminiscent of a lot of different other operating systems that are out there and it's very easy to get used to down at the bottom here we have our menu bar Wi-Fi Bluetooth we also have access to our apps under programming we have code Lite Jeannie mu this is a simple Python editor and I would recommend using something like this if you're messing around with any kind of coding for the first time especially with the foundation kit and we'll take a look at that in a second we have scratch to scratch 3 sonic PI you can code music right here this is actually included with raspbian otherwise known as raspberry pi OS education PI top future this is going to open up the PI top website and from here we can actually search for different things we'd like to do with the PI top 4 now since I have that foundation kit going I'm going to search for buzzer this is going to give us a quick walkthrough on how to set up the buzzer and write a Python code to make it work in any different way you'd like it's very easy to read through as you can see connections this can be plugged into any of the ports marked D on the foundation plate and as you can see we have eight of them we scroll down a little more it's just going to give you some information in an example code we also have an example code too most of these come with two or three different example codes this is the PM a buzzer on and off Python script I'm actually going to go with example I can download it from here or you can go ahead and copy it out if you'd like to I'm gonna keep we'll just open that up and it's gonna open up the EZ Python editor we could actually run this like it sits or we can change some parameters in here so while this is true when I hit run the buzzer is gonna turn on it's gonna print buzz the buzzers gonna buzz for about a second it's gonna sleep for a second it means it's off then it's gonna buzz again so if I hit this I do have it plugged in nothing's actually happening because right here it's saying d2 I need to swap this out to d1 because that's the port that I have this plugged into so if it go to d1 and now press run and I hope you guys can hear that I'm pretty sure you can we'll go ahead and stop it now even though we just downloaded that Python code for a lot of people who are starting out this just makes it so much easier to get acquainted with it as you can see it wasn't working at first we had to change that port to d1 we can also change the duration of the sleep or the buzz itself and this is gonna be a great learning tool for my kids and even myself this is something I'll definitely be using at our local Boys and Girls Club once a month when we were open now that we have everything going on everything's closed down right now I would come in and do a little bit of coding with the kids I can bring this in with the foundation kit and they're gonna love this I mean it is so easy to setup and it's actually really really fun so obviously they put a big emphasis on education when it comes to pie top or the pie top 4 but that doesn't mean we can't get some work done or have some fun with this along with the pie top os we do have the full libre office suite built in chromium web browser VNC viewers so I can access my Mac Windows or my Linux PC from my Raspberry Pi I've also installed the media edition of chromium which allows me to watch Netflix and Disney Plus on something like this under sound and video VLC media player you can play back from an external USB Drive or you can download your videos and movies directly to the SD card from chromium we also have which is one of my favorite image editors of all time this is an open source image at works great on the Raspberry Pi and if you want to do some light image editing right on the pie just use this application basically it's free Photoshop from games minecraft PI is pre-installed and I've also installed the code the classics from the Raspberry Pi foundation and open arena which is basically quake 3 arena it's a freeware version of it system tools check for updates this is something I actually like about this PI top OS as a software updater pre-installed so you don't have to go through terminal if you don't want to it'll just check right here it's gonna check for updates and it'll probably say that I'm fully updated because I've already done this along with system tools we have a few things in here that do come in handy we have a simple task manager and we have a CH top I'll go with the simple task manager as you can see my CPU is sitting at about 9% and we have 4 gigs of ram with only four hundred and thirty nine megabytes being used right now we also have some accessories that come pre-installed like this like copying your SD card if you want to make a backup we have help debian references if you need any help with Pi top you can go here it's just gonna open up a chromium web browser and bring us to the Help section but overall I mean it's a full fledged operating system and in my opinion it works really really well on the Raspberry Pi 4 and the PI top for now before I wrap this up I did want to kind of at least pull one of the halves of the tops off of this thing just to see what we got inside of here I got a good idea of how its setup they do have kind of an exploded view on their website but I still wanted to take a look and I mean this thing is put together really nicely we have that Raspberry Pi 4 there they have this proprietary hat that actually interfaces with the O LED we also have a heatsink on the CPU along with a centrifugal fan and as you can see here one of the reasons it's missing an external USB 2.0 port is because it's interfacing here and I guess it's pulling data or allowing data to be pushed to the PI so in the end I got to say I really do like the PI top 4 we have built-in battery built-in speaker we have that Raspberry Pi for 4 gigs of ram quad-core at 1.5 gigahertz overall this is an awesome little computing machine when I first heard about the development of the PI top four I was actually a little worried that it was just going to be a Raspberry Pi 4 and but that's far from the truth this is actually a really awesome education tool and I wish these were around when I was younger and if I was a teacher right now I would definitely be trying to get some of these in my classroom for my students but that's it for this one I really appreciate you watching I will leave some links in the description if there's anything else you want to see running on the pie top for just let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today we're gonna be taking a look at the PI top 4 now ever since the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced this has been in development and I've been really wanting to get my hands on it it kind of fell off my radar until recently and I actually reached out to the PI top company to send one over for review so here it is PI top has been around for a while making different products for the Raspberry Pi or that incorporate the Raspberry Pi and the PI top 4 is no different it might just look like a simple Raspberry Pi case but there's actually a lot of tech built into the PI top 4 and along with the PI top I also received the foundation kit which is actually really awesome it contains these little sensor pods as they're called and it allows you to easily attach LEDs sensors and buttons and you can code from the PI top 4 to get all of this up and working and we'll also be taking a look at this but it comes with one foundation plate which allows you to easily attach all of these sensor pods to the PI top 4 alright so let's go ahead and get this out of the box this is powered by the Raspberry Pi 4 comes with a four gigabyte model installed in this awesome little case here and like I mentioned it's not just a case we have an LED up top it's got a built in battery as a built-in cooling system with a centrifugal fan and from this oh le D up top we can take a look at what's going on with the Raspberry Pi without even having to look at a screen connected over HDMI and we also have this connector on the bottom which allows us to interface with the foundation play and the sensor pods personally I think this is an awesome little setup and we'll get back to this in a second but I do want to go over the accessories that come with the PI top 4 obviously you're gonna get a little bit of documentation here really it's telling you to go over to the PI top website to find out more we also get these two connectors USB type-c 2 full-sized USB and USB type-c 2 full-sized HDMI there is a proprietary port on the side and we'll look at that in a second but it's really there to connect to the PI top screen which is sold separately it just uses USB type-c out and it will also power that monitor we also have a little baggie here with some hardware mainly GPIO extensions we got a screw driver and that looks about it I think there's a couple replacement parts in here also and finally the charging brick itself this will power the PI top 4 from wall power if you want to use it that way and it also charges the internal battery so I do have to say I really like the look here I love the color scheme they went with overall everything's really nicely packaged here we can easily access the micro SD card from this side and we also have some status LEDs plus we do have a built-in 2 watt speaker here up top we have that Oh le d-- display that'll give us some information while the pi is running there's also four buttons to navigate that interface but over on this side is where all the magic happens as you can see we have a USB type-c charger and power port the PI top display port which is a proprietary port that allows you to connect this to the PI top display which is sold separately but this unit here we'll throw video out and power to that display but just keep in mind they also include an adapter that allows you to turn this into a strictly HDMI out port there's also a micro HDMI port one USB 2.0 port two USB 3.0 ports and gigabyte Ethernet they've also included a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and we have a safe power and reset button with an LED indicator to let you know the status so real quick I did want to take a look at this o LED display I'm going to go ahead and power this on you'll just hold the power button for around two seconds it'll start booting the Raspberry Pi up and once it's booted it'll let you know by giving you the PI top logo and we can actually access a few features from this screen here so we can check out the battery percentage we can also check the status of the USB the ethernet and the Wi-Fi along with the Wi-Fi it'll give us our IP address plus they've included a CPU usage widget so we can check out all four cores here if we press the little circle button it'll go to our settings we'll just tap it twice we can enable terminal from here VNC viewer and I believe we have access to refreshing our HDMI ports in case you want to swap out from one to the other as you saw I also receive the foundation kit this is the foundation plate it's got all the ports here that we need to connect our sensor pods up and this snaps right onto the bottom of the pie top four it's actually pretty easy to do and there we have it we now have access to all of the ports we need for these little sensor pods and it comes with wire for each and personally I really like the idea of these sensor pods they're really easy to use and there's no mess of wires I mean it has one connector for each and usually if you buy a kit like this on let's say Amazon for 30 bucks comes with a hundred sensors but there's also fifty miles of wire for kids and adults alike starting out for coding I think this is a really awesome little option here they've just made it so simple to just plug these right into your PI top 4 and get started and speaking of getting started it's super simple to do I'm just using their proprietary port here over to a portable monitor with an HDMI adapter on the end just go ahead and hold that button for around two seconds it's gonna start up this does come pre-loaded with a 16 gigabyte micro sd card and PI top OS which is based on raspbian and I'm a big fan of this I've been a big fan of Pi top since the Raspberry Pi 2 I've actually done a review on a few different PI top products like the PI top seed which was for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ now since this is powered by 4 gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4 we have 4 gigs of lpddr4 ram 4 cores at 1.5 gigahertz and you could overclock because this does have a heatsink and fan built in but it will kill the battery a lot faster okay so I've just connected this to my Game Capture to make it a little easier to look at this is PI top OS running on the PI top 4 very reminiscent of a lot of different other operating systems that are out there and it's very easy to get used to down at the bottom here we have our menu bar Wi-Fi Bluetooth we also have access to our apps under programming we have code Lite Jeannie mu this is a simple Python editor and I would recommend using something like this if you're messing around with any kind of coding for the first time especially with the foundation kit and we'll take a look at that in a second we have scratch to scratch 3 sonic PI you can code music right here this is actually included with raspbian otherwise known as raspberry pi OS education PI top future this is going to open up the PI top website and from here we can actually search for different things we'd like to do with the PI top 4 now since I have that foundation kit going I'm going to search for buzzer this is going to give us a quick walkthrough on how to set up the buzzer and write a Python code to make it work in any different way you'd like it's very easy to read through as you can see connections this can be plugged into any of the ports marked D on the foundation plate and as you can see we have eight of them we scroll down a little more it's just going to give you some information in an example code we also have an example code too most of these come with two or three different example codes this is the PM a buzzer on and off Python script I'm actually going to go with example I can download it from here or you can go ahead and copy it out if you'd like to I'm gonna keep we'll just open that up and it's gonna open up the EZ Python editor we could actually run this like it sits or we can change some parameters in here so while this is true when I hit run the buzzer is gonna turn on it's gonna print buzz the buzzers gonna buzz for about a second it's gonna sleep for a second it means it's off then it's gonna buzz again so if I hit this I do have it plugged in nothing's actually happening because right here it's saying d2 I need to swap this out to d1 because that's the port that I have this plugged into so if it go to d1 and now press run and I hope you guys can hear that I'm pretty sure you can we'll go ahead and stop it now even though we just downloaded that Python code for a lot of people who are starting out this just makes it so much easier to get acquainted with it as you can see it wasn't working at first we had to change that port to d1 we can also change the duration of the sleep or the buzz itself and this is gonna be a great learning tool for my kids and even myself this is something I'll definitely be using at our local Boys and Girls Club once a month when we were open now that we have everything going on everything's closed down right now I would come in and do a little bit of coding with the kids I can bring this in with the foundation kit and they're gonna love this I mean it is so easy to setup and it's actually really really fun so obviously they put a big emphasis on education when it comes to pie top or the pie top 4 but that doesn't mean we can't get some work done or have some fun with this along with the pie top os we do have the full libre office suite built in chromium web browser VNC viewers so I can access my Mac Windows or my Linux PC from my Raspberry Pi I've also installed the media edition of chromium which allows me to watch Netflix and Disney Plus on something like this under sound and video VLC media player you can play back from an external USB Drive or you can download your videos and movies directly to the SD card from chromium we also have which is one of my favorite image editors of all time this is an open source image at works great on the Raspberry Pi and if you want to do some light image editing right on the pie just use this application basically it's free Photoshop from games minecraft PI is pre-installed and I've also installed the code the classics from the Raspberry Pi foundation and open arena which is basically quake 3 arena it's a freeware version of it system tools check for updates this is something I actually like about this PI top OS as a software updater pre-installed so you don't have to go through terminal if you don't want to it'll just check right here it's gonna check for updates and it'll probably say that I'm fully updated because I've already done this along with system tools we have a few things in here that do come in handy we have a simple task manager and we have a CH top I'll go with the simple task manager as you can see my CPU is sitting at about 9% and we have 4 gigs of ram with only four hundred and thirty nine megabytes being used right now we also have some accessories that come pre-installed like this like copying your SD card if you want to make a backup we have help debian references if you need any help with Pi top you can go here it's just gonna open up a chromium web browser and bring us to the Help section but overall I mean it's a full fledged operating system and in my opinion it works really really well on the Raspberry Pi 4 and the PI top for now before I wrap this up I did want to kind of at least pull one of the halves of the tops off of this thing just to see what we got inside of here I got a good idea of how its setup they do have kind of an exploded view on their website but I still wanted to take a look and I mean this thing is put together really nicely we have that Raspberry Pi 4 there they have this proprietary hat that actually interfaces with the O LED we also have a heatsink on the CPU along with a centrifugal fan and as you can see here one of the reasons it's missing an external USB 2.0 port is because it's interfacing here and I guess it's pulling data or allowing data to be pushed to the PI so in the end I got to say I really do like the PI top 4 we have built-in battery built-in speaker we have that Raspberry Pi for 4 gigs of ram quad-core at 1.5 gigahertz overall this is an awesome little computing machine when I first heard about the development of the PI top four I was actually a little worried that it was just going to be a Raspberry Pi 4 and but that's far from the truth this is actually a really awesome education tool and I wish these were around when I was younger and if I was a teacher right now I would definitely be trying to get some of these in my classroom for my students but that's it for this one I really appreciate you watching I will leave some links in the description if there's anything else you want to see running on the pie top for just let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching you\n"