Hello there!, So you just got a shiny new Raspberry Pi. Well done and congrats! In this tutorial, we are going to look at how we can set up your Raspberry Pi and get it up and running.
What you need to get started
First and foremost we have to ensure that we have all the required items to get started. Here is a short list of items that are absolutely required to get the ball rolling.
- Raspberry Pi (buy from Amazon) (you guessed it right!)
- USB power adapter (buy from Amazon)(you could get away with a normal USB cable, but it is not recommended)
- micro SD card / SD card adapter (buy from Amazon)(at least 8 GB in size, 32 GB or more recommended. Hey it’s not that costly!). The given link points to a bundle that includes an SD card adapter.
- USB card reader (buy from Amazon)(you will need this for plugging the microSD card onto your computer to load the Operating System. If your PC/Mac has a supported card reader, that’s fine too!).
- USB keyboard / Mouse (buy from Amazon)(to get the OS setup properly during installation)
- HDMI cable (buy from Amazon)and a monitor (well, you need to see what you’re doing)
Optional
- Ethernet cable / USB-WiFi adapter (buy from Amazon)– Unless you have a Raspberry Pi 3 model b+, this will come in handy to connect to the internet and update your software packages
You can also get these as a bundle (buy from Amazon) or if you have some of the components lying around, then you could selectively get them as needed.
Getting your OS ready
Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer and just like your laptop and desktop PC, it needs to run an Operating System. Since Raspberry Pi runs an ARM-based processor (If you haven’t heard of ARM processors, they are low power processors commonly found in your mobile phones and tablets), we need to use a supporting version of OS. Luckily both the Raspberry Pi foundation and many of the Linux community members have created many Operating Systems that you can choose from to run on your board! In this tutorial, we are going to use NOOBS distribution which you can find here.
Once you go to the above link, choose NOOBS, and you will be given two options, select NOOBS. This is a large file and it might take some time. Be patient!
In the meanwhile, we need another piece of software that helps us format and transfer our OS to our microSD card. You can find the software here.
Once the SDFormatter tool is installed, and the OS image is downloaded, we are ready to go!
The first step is to unzip the NOOBS file that you have downloaded. You will get a NOOBS_v3_0_0 folder or something similar depending on your OS version. Open up the SDFormatter tool and insert your microSD card onto your PC. You can either use a USB microSD adapter like this or use the one that’s in your laptop / PC.
On the SDFormatter tool select the drive that corresponds to your SD card. Make sure this is correct!.
IMPORTANT: Please back up any data before formatting!
Once the formatting is complete, you can copy the contents of the NOOB folder which would be something similar to what is shown below onto your formatted SD card.
Connecting all pieces and booting up!
All right, we’re almost there! Now we need to connect our Raspberry Pi to our peripherals and boot it up for the first time.
Here, I have used a USB keyboard, a Wireless Logitech mouse that has a wireless USB adapter. I have plugged in a USB Wi-Fi adapter to connect to my network and an HDMI cable to connect to my monitor. The overall setup after setting up everything including power looks something like this.
Setting up the OS
Once we have the setup ready, let’s connect the board to the peripherals and power and boot it up. Initially, you will see a dialog box to select the operating system
Select Raspbian Full and click the install button. The installation dialog will follow afterward. It will copy the files and install the OS.
Once the OS is installed, the system will reboot and you will be welcomed with the new desktop!. Next, you will be prompted to set up your account password, keyboard profile, and timezone as well as connect to a Wi-Fi endpoint. That is pretty much it!
Hello world in Python
Fire up the terminal by going to the menu button on the top left and selecting the terminal. Open up a python shell by entering
python
This opens up a python shell, say hello world from your shiny new raspberry pi!
print "Hello world!"
Wrap up
So that’s it! We’ve made it to the end and we have a Raspberry Pi up and running! Woohoo! Now is the fun part, which is all the fun things we could do with it. I’ll be doing some interesting projects that you could follow along on this blog going forward. Make sure to subscribe to thecodebits.com to receive updates. See you all soon!
from Planet Python
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