Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

January 30, 2023

Raspberry Pi

I got myself a Raspberry Pi for Christmas this year. I've never worked with one before, but I'm very enticed by the idea of using something like this or an Arduino to build my own devices. I know I'm well behind the curve on this hobby, but luckily there are tons and tons of resources across the internet for doing all sorts of stuff with a Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, in the spirit of tracking technical things I'm trying and learning about on this blog, I wanted to write a little bit about my Pi journey as I go through it. Today's post is a guide for how I got mine set up.

Hardware

Here's the stuff I needed in order to get going. I ordered these things from Amazon, because it's the 2020s and that's what you do.

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Starter Kit; comes with:
- the Raspberry Pi itself
- a plastic case for the Raspberry Pi
- a PWM fan
- a power supply with a built-in on/off switch (connects to the Pi via USB-C)
- HDMI Cables
- 64GB SD card with a card reader adapter thing
- Heat sinks
Mini wired USB keyboard
AmazonBasics 3-button wired USB mouse

Otherwise it connects via HDMI to my computer monitor. Sweet, very easy.

Installing

Here are the steps I took to getting my Pi up and running:

Install the heat sinks
- Heat sinks are little pieces of hardware that sit on top of the RAM, the processor, and a couple of other components to try and help keep them cool when the Pi is running
- These adhere with some adhesive that comes attached to the heat sinks. It's easy enough, but here is a video on installing heat sinks on a Raspberry Pi 4
Download NOOBS (New Out of Box Software) on another computer
- NOOBS is an OS installation wizard for your Pi that comes as a ZIP file available on the Raspberry Pi GitHub
- I downloaded it on a MacBook Pro, so the instructions that follow are for that OS, but instructions abound for Windows or Linux users. Once the ZIP file is downloaded, unzip it. This can take a little while
Format the SD card to FAT32
- You need to make space on the SD card to accommodate the NOOBS software, and configure the SD card to FAT32, which is the disk format that Raspberry Pi can read.
- I followed the guide on this page, but on a MacBook Pro:
  1. Open Terminal and run diskutil list without the SD card plugged in
    - This shows the MacBook's default available disks (i.e., the ones I didn't want to format)
  2. Plug in the SD card and run diskutil list again
    - This shows the same available disk lists, now including the SD Card
    - In this way you've identified which disk you want to format
    - Take note of the disk number for the SD card for the next step
  3. Run sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 [DISKNAME] MBRFormat /dev/disk[DISKNUMBER]
    - Important: Replace [DISKNAME] with the name you want for the disk (all caps) and [DISKNUMBER] with the disk number from the previous step
  4. The SD card is now formatted to FAT32
Copy the unzipped contents of NOOBS onto the formatted SD card
Unmount the SD card from MacBook
Insert the SD card into Raspberry Pi
Power on Raspberry Pi
Follow the installation wizard to set up Raspbian OS on your Raspberry Pi
- Raspbian OS is an operating system for Raspberry Pi based on the Debian Linux distribution
Connect Raspberry Pi to wi-fi
After setting up the Raspberry Pi's operating system you can configure it for SSH access via wi-fi
- This allows you to run the (powered on) Raspberry Pi remotely from another computer via SSH

At this point I turned the Pi off, installed the PWM fan per the provided instructions, and installed all of this hardware into the provided case. When I turned it on again, the fan came on and it booted up like expected. It's now all ready to go for whatever projects I want to do with it now!

Sources / Further Reading

Bring Back Blogging Plug

This is my third and last post for January, in which I've participated in Bring Back Blogging. It's been a fun month and I've knocked out a few more items from my post backlog that have been following me around for a long time. I'm excited to continue with a (largely) clean slate, following through on some creative projects and new areas that I haven't previously gone into on this blog. BBB was a great motivator to get here.

I also want to highlight one more blog I discovered through BBB, which is Typographica. This is a blog that digs into the fun discipline of typography. Designers who work in type will provide reviews or commentary on different typefaces or books about type. It's a niche field that is also vast. I find it interesting, even if much of it goes largely over my head.

From a technical standpoint, it's a WordPress blog. It looks like a few months ago they celebrated twenty years, which is incredible. In the footer is a colophon. I love a good colophon. And the archive pages look kind of like the Styles section of a Google Fonts font page where you can see how a font itself might look at different weights and stylings. Very subtle and cool.

That's all for January and my contributions to Bring Back Blogging. Onward to the rest of 2023!