Raspberry Pi is a small factor fully-featured computer. It can be used for multiple purposes such as a controller.
In most of applications it is necessary to use some kind of communication interface. Raspberry Pi delivers, among others, UART, SPI and I2c. However, UART (serial port) is most commonly used if you just want to send some data between RPi and other devices. While using SPI or I2c in i.e. python script is rather straightforward, using serial port, or making it to work, isn’t so easy as it might seem.