Getting Started with Raspi

(Backdated: Nov. 11, 2016)

Using a Raspberry Pi can be incredibly unintuitive if you have no previous experience with it. In all my researching, I never found anything that definitively told me how exactly I should set up my Raspi, or what to expect. In particular, I assumed that I could connect my Raspi to my laptop and start working from there. In fact, that is not how this works. Because a Raspberry Pi is essentially a mini-computer, it operates on its own — in order to work with it, you connect it to a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse, and continue from there. Luckily, I have teammates who knew that and were willing to help; otherwise, I would have been extremely frustrated for a while.

The Raspi we used for this project

Nathan walked me through the process of flashing the Raspbian OS to an SD card and using that to get started on the Raspi itself. The process went as follows:

1. First, we downloaded NOOBS from the Raspberry Pi website.
2. Those files were copied onto the Pi’s microSD card.
3. Next, we connected the Pi to a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and a low-voltage power source. We also inserted the microSD card into the Pi.
4. According to Nathan, anything can be done in Linux without a mouse: except for checking the box that selects the Rasbian OS. When the install screen came up, we checked that box and clicked install.

That was it! The only other note Nathan had for me was that in order to shut down, I should use the command $sudo shutdown or $sudo shutdown now because if I just unplugged the Pi without shutting it down, I might corrupt the files. (Sounds familiar, right? This really is just a small computer.)

Today, our touch screen arrived in the mail, so I decided to connect it to the Pi and play around with how that works. I’ve been testing out GUI development in the Python package Tkinter, so I have one page of our GUI done. That meant I could test how the GUI interacts with the touch screen and diagnose whether or not I need to do anything special to make the GUI usable. It turns out that Python GUIs tend to be usable no matter what — a button should work regardless of whether you press it using your mouse or your finger.

Knowing that I don’t need to test directly on the touch screen, I decided to clone our GitHub repo onto the Raspi. That way, I can work on the GUI code from my laptop and test it on the Pi later. Not carrying the Pi and its touch screen and a keyboard around means that 1) my bag is lighter; and 2) I’m no longer paranoid about dropping or losing something because all pieces are safe in the PoE lab. From here, I’m launching completely into GUI development.