{"id":1446,"date":"2012-12-24T22:05:44","date_gmt":"2012-12-24T22:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2013-01-15T18:32:50","modified_gmt":"2013-01-15T18:32:50","slug":"its-a-pi-a-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/2012\/12\/24\/its-a-pi-a-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"Its a Pi, a Pi!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raspberrypi.org\/\">Raspberry Pi<\/a> finally arrived a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who haven&#8217;t come across such a geeky accessory yet, it&#8217;s a very small, very cheap computer that can be used for, well, really quite a lot of things. I cut my teeth on the BBC Micro in the 1980s, and for me, the Pi fulfills the same purpose today. It&#8217;s a fully general purpose computer that can be plugged into the TV, the internet and because it&#8217;s got some very accessible General Purpose IO pins, it&#8217;s dead easy to connect to bits of electronic gadgetry too.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t try to duplicate any of the excellent material already on the internet for getting started with the Pi, but if you&#8217;ve just found a Pi in your stocking, then the newly released <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raspberrypi.org\/archives\/2892\">Offical Quick Start<\/a> guide is worth a few minutes of your time.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/the-pi.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/the-pi-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"the pi\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1447\" srcset=\"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/the-pi-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/the-pi.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Instruction manuals aren&#8217;t really for me, so here&#8217;s what I think is a useful list for getting started with a Pi:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Start with a 4Gb SD card and write <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raspberrypi.org\/downloads\">Raspbian Wheezy<\/a> to it.<\/li>\n<li>The Pi needs a micro-USB 5V supply, it uses about 700mA itself and needs a bit left over to power things like USB keyboards.  I power mine with my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B0030CDMXW\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=davsbitofthew-21&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1634&#038;creative=19450&#038;creativeASIN=B0030CDMXW\">Nokia AC 10x<\/a> phone charger, it&#8217;s good for about 1200mA.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s counter intuitive, but the Pi is also cable of <i>taking<\/i> power from its USB sockets, so plugging it into a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B003DVC7N6\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=davsbitofthew-21&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1634&#038;creative=19450&#038;creativeASIN=B003DVC7N6\">powered USB Hub<\/a> will also power your Pi. The PSU that comes with that hub is good for 2A, which should be plenty if you&#8217;re not trying to spin a hard drive.<\/li>\n<li>Out of the box, the Pi will automatically route audio to its 3.5mm socket AND to HDMI if you&#8217;re using that. If you&#8217;re not using HDMI, you can also use an adaptor to DVI-D, composite video really isn&#8217;t great compared to 1920&#215;1080.<\/li>\n<li>If you ever want the <a href=\"http:\/\/elinux.org\/RPi_raspi-config\">first boot configuration screen<\/a> back again, it&#8217;s called raspi-config<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re using composite video on an old TV, you may lose some text from the edges. Play with the overscan numbers in \/boot\/config.txt to fix this.<\/li>\n<li>The Broadcom SoC is 3.3v and is capable of sourcing and sinking about 20mA from each of its GPIO pins, with a total of about 200mA from all of it. Do not blow it up by trying to source too much current (use a resistor with that LED!) or by feeding it a 5V TTL signal.<\/li>\n<li>Out of the box, Raspbian will run DHCP on its wired ethernet port. I was lucky and my Linksys USB WUSB600N Wifi adapter is also supported out of the box. Hooking it up to a WPA network is as simple as editing \/etc\/network\/interfaces and replacing all of the configuration for wlan0 with:<br \/>\n<blockquote>\n<pre>\r\n    auto wlan0\r\n    iface wlan0 inet dhcp\r\n    wpa-ssid ==YOUR NETWORK's SSID==\r\n    wpa-psk ==YOUR NETWORK's PASSPHRASE==\r\n  <\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s less secure than saving your passphrase encrypted with wpa-passphrase but it&#8217;s quick to set up<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My final note is that, if you&#8217;re at all interested in having your Pi interface with the outside world, go and say hello to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adafruit.com\/\">Adafruit Industries<\/a> who make, well, almost every toy you&#8217;re likely to need and will teach you how to use it. <a href=\"http:\/\/robosavvy.com\/site\/\">Robosavvy<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sparkfun.com\/\">Sparkfun<\/a> will have everything else. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Raspberry Pi finally arrived a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who haven&#8217;t come across such a geeky accessory yet, it&#8217;s a very small, very cheap computer that can be used for, well, really quite a lot of things. I cut my teeth on the BBC Micro in the 1980s, and for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/the-pi.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1503,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}