Getting started with the Raspberry Pi

When I first started playing around with the Raspberry Pi it wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d have liked. I’d unplug my TV from my AppleTV, so I could plug the Pi into it. Then I’d have to unplug my USB keyboard from my computer so the Pi could borrow it for a bit. Then depending on my mood, I had the option of finding a huge ethernet cable and stringing it from the router in my hallway into the lounge, or I could try and get the thing up and running on my wi-fi. Either way, I had to sit on the floor in front of my TV and fiddle around for longer than I’d like.

Once it was up and running, it was a breeze — I could SSH in from my Mac and all was well with the world, but the pain of getting it to that point was often enough for me to put off the whole process.

I love the Raspberry Pi and I want everyone to play with one. I’ve built boring stuff like DNS and DHCP servers on it. I’ve grafted one onto my exercise bike to track my rides. I watch TV in any room in my house through a Raspberry Pi in the loft. And more recently I’ve created a colour-changing, wizz-bang bedside light that I can control from Siri. Raspberry Pi’s are great, but first you have to install an OS on them and find where they’re lurking on your network.

I am lazy, so there had to be a better way — and there is…

Right, down to business

Ok, my monologue is over. Let’s get a Pi up and running . To do this, you need two things that you may not have, but will soon love:

1. PiBakery — a tool for getting your Pi set up before you even connect to it.
2. Fing — a tool for finding what’s on your network.

Once you have these, you can begin:

1. Insert a MicroSD card into your computer.
2. Fire up PiBakery.
3. Drag and drop so that it looks like the picture below.
4. Edit your wi-fi details so they’re right for your network (don’t worry about this step if you’re using an ethernet cable to connect to your network).
5. Set up a password for the pi user.
6. Set your desired hostname — mine was for my bedroom lamp, so I called it “sunriselamp”. Choose your own.
7. If you have an SSH key pair set up, then paste the public key in where it says “Key:”. If you don’t understand this step, then you can skip it, but I’d recommend reading this at some point.
8. We’re good to go — click “Write”.
9. Choose the correct SD Card. If you get this wrong you can damage the files on your computer — make sure you choose the right device.
10. Choose “Raspbian Lite” as the operating system if you’re happy it’s right for you. If you’re not sure, then go with the full version as it contains everything.
11. Click “Start Write”.
12. Check again that you do have the correct device and then proceed if you’re happy.

Once PiBakery has finished writing your SD card, it’s time to put it into your Raspberry Pi and power it up. Give it a couple of minutes to configure itself and reboot.

Now, all being well it’ll connect automatically to your network. Yay!

But we don’t know what IP address it’s using. Damn!

This is where the second of the two tools I mentioned earlier comes in handy; it’s called Fing. It’s a great, free, app that will scan your network and show all the devices connected. Here’s our Raspberry Pi:

Cool, so now we can try to SSH into our Raspberry Pi — I’ll assume you have the relevant tools on your computer to do this (Mac: use Terminal or iTerm2, Windows: use PuTTY, Linux: you probably know what you’re doing). So in my case:

ssh pi@192.168.0.93

You’ll need to replace the IP address with the one that Fing reported. If you’ve set up an SSH key in PiBakery, you should be straight in; if not, then you’ll need to use the password that you set up instead.

That’s it!

You’re in and your Pi is running. Now you can do cool stuff. It’s probably worth updating your packages first so you have the latest and greatest of everything:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now you really are ready to go. Have fun and play around. If you break anything, just follow the steps above to start again. It’s like play dough — make a thing, break a thing, squish it all together and start again. I love the Raspberry Pi and I hope you get some fun out of it too. Please do leave comments — I’d love to know what you make and if this tutorial was useful.