History

Raspberry Pi

Everyone has their story on Raspberry Pi. Mine started on late Feb 2012 when I heard of a small computer board released via RS Components and Farnell which took their website down.The Raspberry Pi Model B created a hype around Single Board Computers which many other competitors (not exactly) failed such as Beagle Board series.As a matter of fact the board did pack a puch ,with a powerful GPU that can play HD media content ,a power efficient single core CPU , an ethernet port , USB ports , HDMI and RCA at a price 35 $ !!.

I was introduced to the hardware by Pramode CE during a workshop.
Raspberry Pi then went through multiple revisions and now we have Raspberry Pi version 3.
Now your story begins.

What you need?

  1. Raspberry Pi Version 2 or later.
  2. Micro SD card,8GB or Higher and Class 6 or higher.
  3. Raspbian Jessie Image,you may download it from official website.
  4. LCD/LED Display.
  5. HDMI- VGA Converter,skip if your display has HDMI in.
  6. USB Keyboard and Mouse.
  7. Wall adapter 2A rated.
  8. Micro USB Cable.
  9. Ethernet Cable.

SD Card Setup

  • Insert SD card in your machine using a card reader and find its address.Try in terminal
    lsblk
    In my case it was mmcblk0
  • If you have a fresh SD card,copy the the image file(.img) after extraction to the memory.Make sure that you are in the same directory as image and then try
    sudo dd if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=2M status=progress
sudo sync
    "status=progress" flag is used to show the Read Write status but it wont work on Ubuntu 14.04 unless you upgrade coreutils from 8.21 to 8.24. Else remove the flag and wait(~20mins) for the processs to complete in background.
  • If you have an old SD card or if the above process fails to provide a bootable SD card, try writing zeroes to remove partitions and repeat the previous step.
    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=2M status=progress
sudo sync
  • Now insert the card to Rasbperry Pi
  • Connect the HDMI to VGA adapter (if necessary) ,USB Keyboard ,USB Mouse and ethernet cable for internet access
The course is based on Raspbian Jessie.You are free to use a different OS. For most Generic Applications Raspbian is fine.
If you are looking for a Media Box try OSMC - Open Source Media Center based on Kodi or OpenELEC, or if you are a fan of Mate then Ubuntu Mate ,or Snappy Core for Cloud applications.There is also RISC OS which offers a very different experience and the list goes on!!
>