Since the first Raspberry pie arrived on the market in 2012, many models came out on the market, and in the same way, many users acquired one at the time and it ended up being forgotten in a drawer. If this is your case and you don’t even remember what model of Raspberry Pi If you have purchased it, don’t worry, because in this article we will teach you how to quickly and easily identify the model.
Let’s be honest: the Raspberry Pi is a very “sweet” and extremely versatile device, because with one of these small devices we can have everything, from a home server to a desktop computer, including a myriad of intermediate options. But despite this, many of us bought a model at the time, handled it for a while and it ended up in a drawer gathering dust…
How to know which Raspberry Pi model you have
The best thing would be to find the receipt and see what model you bought at the time, but seeing as it was maybe 10 years ago… it can be complicated. For this reason, the easiest thing is to connect the device and turn it on to check, through the operating system, which model you have. It’s very simple, just turn it on, wait for the operating system to load, open a console and enter the following command:
cat /sys/firmware/devidetree/model
After executing this command, we will be able to see on the screen the card number of the Raspberry Pi that we have in possession, although we can also do the following:
sudo raspi-config
This command will run a sort of Raspberry Pi setup wizard, but in the area we have marked in red at the top, the Raspberry Pi model we have will be displayed.
Commands to find hardware information
Of course, and although each Raspberry Pi model has specific hardware that you can easily search and find on the Internet, we can run certain commands to see detailed information about the system hardware, including some monitoring parameters. For example, if you want to know what processor the device has, you would run the following command:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
Other commands that may be useful for finding out information about the Raspberry Pi hardware are:
- cat /proc/version -> displays information about the version of the currently running operating system.
- vcgencmd Measure_temp -> will display CPU temperature.
- cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq -> will show the CPU operating frequency.
- cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq -> similar to the previous command, in this case it will display the maximum operating frequency of the CPU.
- vcgencmd Measure_volts core -> will display the voltage the processor is operating at.
- vcgencmd get_mem gpu -> this command displays information about GPU memory usage.
- cat /proc/meminfo -> with this command we will see information related to the RAM memory of the Raspberry Pi.
You should keep in mind that while some commands are common to all Linux distributions, many of them (especially those that use vcgencmd) are inherent to the Raspberry Pi and will therefore only work when you run them on a Raspberry himself.
