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Let’s Explore Raspberry Pi

explore raspberry pi

After far too long, I decided it was time to explore Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi is a well performing microcomputer on a single board. Unlike the Arduino and similar microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi is a real computer, not that much different than your desktop or laptop. The latest model – Raspberry Pi 2 – costs under US $40 at the popular Adafruit store, or about $55 up here in Canada at my favorite local outlet Memory Express.

If you want to explore Raspberry Pi history, check out their web site and read the story on Wikipedia. In brief, this single board computer was created to stimulate teaching computer science in schools and developing countries. However, with more than six million shipped (as well as the emergence of clones and work-alike boards) there is now a large global community of folks using and finding time to explore Raspberry Pi.

There are four reasons why Raspberry Pi is a great deal and a useful device, particularly the new RPi2 B model which I got.

  • It is a real computer containing a high speed quad core CPU and graphics processing unit. It has the same capabilities as the desktop or laptop computer of a few years ago at an order of magnitude lower price. This is especially true of the new Pi Zero model which sells for around $5 and comes close to the Pi 2 B model in performance.
  • It comes ready to easily connect to resources you already have around the house through four USB ports, an Ethernet connector, HDMI and composite video connectors for a monitor, as well as additional connections for other displays and a camera. The Pi obtains its power from a micro-USB connector, so you can power it from many phone chargers or other USB chargers. (However, most people recommend supplying at least 2 amps of 5 volt power to the Pi, and I agree. You can do this through a separate power cube, which I also bought.) Finally, it contains 40 general purpose input-output pins if you want to hook up sensors, motor controls, and so on.
  • There is a ton of software for the Pi, which generally uses the open source Linux operating system. You can easily write your own software using languages like Python, and software efforts are supported by a huge user community.
  • You may have noticed that I have not mentioned storage. While you can easily configure the Pi to use hard and optical drives over USB, or network storage, the essence of the device storage is a micro SD card.  Generally, you start off with an 8 GB micro SD card loaded with something called NOOBS. This stands for “New Out Of the Box Software” which gets you started in loading an operating system, and formatting the SD card as the primary “disk drive” so to speak. The official OS is a version of Linux called Raspian, but you can choose many others, even including a new version of Windows 10 which has been downsized for internet-of-things devices. The great thing about the micro SD card approach is that you can completely reconfigure your Raspberry Pi by swapping these cards and rebooting.

To be honest, I am probably spending too much time explaining why I chose to explore Raspberry Pi. This is sort of like when we used to justify reading Playboy “for the articles”. The plain fact is, I just want to play with it. The Pi, that is.

Explore Raspberry Pi as a Media Center

At roughly 3” by 2”, the Pi gives you an unobtrusive way to put a computer in the living room. Probably the most popular and easiest “first project” when you explore Raspberry Pi is to create a media center. I had mine up and running in three hours – and that includes driving to Memory Express and back!

Here’s how I did it.

  • Configuring the SD card. While NOOBS contains a media server (OpenElec) I decided to use OSMC. OSMC is a combination of Linux (an open source operating system) and Kodi (an open source media system.) So, I used the installer on the OSMC web site to create a micro SD card on my Windows laptop. This included everything for the initial configuration including my home network SSID and password.
  • Configuring the Raspberry Pi. Very few things could be easier. I just plugged a few devices into the Pi: the SD card, a USB keyboard and mouse, an HDMI cable to a computer monitor, a USB WIFI dongle, and lastly, the power supply. That’s it. When I plugged in the power supply, the Pi booted up with the OSMC media center running. I then set up the location of my video files on the network, and started playing a movie.
  • Configuring Kodi. In order to obtain video or music content from the internet, Kodi uses add-ons for different services. Many such add-ons are contained within OSMC. Others can be installed from online repositories such as Fusion. It makes sense to do your initial configurations with a real keyboard and mouse.
  • Hooking up the Television.  After the three configurations steps described above, I disconnected the Raspberry Pi from the keyboard, mouse and monitor, and moved it to my main television, a 55” Samsung. After plugging in the HDMI and rebooting, everything worked.

Well, almost. There is a great feature many home entertainment devices have called HDMI-CEC or Consumer Electronics Control. This enables your television to pass along remote control commands to compatible devices. OSMC and Raspberry Pi are HDMI-CEC compatible. Unfortunately, my model of Samsung television is not. So, I just attached a Bluetooth wireless keyboard to my Pi instead. Be sure to check whether or not your TV has HDMI-CEC – here’s how.

Anyway, I have started to explore Raspberry Pi and will probably do much more with it as time passes.

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