My day-to-day job keeps me firmly in the Microsoft world. So in an effort to broaden my experience I ordered a Raspberry Pi to try my hand at programming Python on Linux. The Raspberry Pi is pretty barebones so I have dug out of my cable box
- A network cable
- An old mouse
- A dusty keyboard
- An HDMI cable
I have had to buy
- An SD memory card
- A mobile phone charger with a mini-USB connector
- A fancy case to house the Pi
In true blogging fashion here is the unboxing procedure :-)
The box the Raspberry Pi arrives in is small and contains only the Raspberry Pi itself and some paper documentation.
The Raspberry Pi motherboard comes complete with Raspberry symbol!
I got a small external case to put the Raspberry Pi in, which while not strictly necessary, does provide a level of protection for the motherboard. The one downside with the case I bought is that it does block some of the ability to plug external boards etc into the Raspberry Pi. So if I want to do any home automation style work I would need to remove the case, buy a new case with more openings, or cut holes in my current case. Not a big problem just at this moment.
After attaching cables etc to the Raspberry Pi the next task was getting an OS installed on an SD card for the computer. To do this first I had to ensure the SD card was formatted in the correct way by using a piece of software called SDFormatter which is available at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/eula_windows/.
Once downloaded you open the SDFormatter application, click on the Option button and then set “Format Size Adjustment” to ON:
You can then allow SDFormatter to format an SD card attached to your computer.
Once I had an SD card in the correct format it was time to download NOOBS from http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/noobs. NOOBS stands for New Out Of Box Software and it contains a range of OSs and software compatible with the Raspberry Pi and packaged in a simple way to get you up and running with your Raspberry Pi as soon as possible.
At this point it was then time to switch the Raspberry Pi on. Everything worked as expected and I was now looking at the following screen asking me which OS I would like to install.
I went with the default Raspbian as I have no particular desire to learn one OS over another at this time. However it’s nice to know that switching to another OS on this computer will be as simple as dropping in another SD card with the appropriate NOOBS software copied onto it.
Finally, after a few bits of configuration I was up and running with my new computer:
Even as an IT professional I still find myself amazed at what we can do these days. From such a small piece of hardware I can have a fully functioning PC, linked to the internet and capable of most everyday computing tasks. It only seems yesterday that my brother and I sat around our Sinclair ZX81 and thought that was amazing :-)
