Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Raspberry Pi – Matt Richardson”.
All right everyone, this is getting started with raspberry pi uh. If you’re looking for getting started with raspberry pi on the make electronic stage just follow my voice, it’s the make electronic stage, i’m just going to jump right into it. Uh welcome everybody. Welcome to maker faire. My name is matt richardson, i’m a contributing editor for make magazine uh.
It means i write about projects. I uh. I build my own projects, i’m a maker myself. I also get to come to maker faire and meet all these other makers and write about what they do.
Among the things that i write are books about new technologies as well and including raspberry, pi, sean wallace, and i good friend of mine. We both wrote together getting started with raspberry pi um, which is available in the maker shed it’s also available over there as well um. So what i’m going to do today is talk about raspberry pi. It’S going to be a real, fast tour about what it is.
If you know nothing about it, you’re going to walk away at least understanding what it is and what you, what you need to get started with it um it’s covered in much much more detail in the book. So basically raspberry pi is a computer, and i mean that in in the most earnest sense, i you hook up a keyboard, monitor mouse to it and you turn it on. You can connect it to the internet. You can uh, you look at websites with it.
You can send emails with it, it really is a computer. Obviously it doesn’t look exactly like a typical computer and there are a few ways. It is different from a computer as well, and it’s really meant for educational use. Uh, the the people who founded the raspberry pi foundation, a non-profit.
They noticed that people coming students who were applying to computer computer science undergrad program didn’t quite have the skills that they used to when they were hacking around with computers, and so they created this really inexpensive board to uh, to get students hacking around and using computers And actually it’s a big hit with makers and i’m going to talk about why in a second, i want to show you around the board a little bit at first at the core. Is a processor just like a computer? Has a processor does all the math. It does all the the moving memory around and moving data around. This one is a it’s about the same power as an iphone or an old iphone. It’S not super powerful, but it’s it’s serviceable. If you’re into the specs, it’s a 700 megahertz arm 11 processor and it has 512 megabytes of ram, as i said, you can connect a monitor to it and in order to do that, you’ve got two possible ways to do that. There’S hdmi port, which is highlighted on the bottom there and an analog composite output on the top. So if you have an older tv, you can use the raspberry pi with that on the bottom, the hdmi, that’s a digital connection, that’ll connect to most modern tvs or monitors that you have. As i mentioned, you can connect a keyboard and mouse to it and that’s why you have the usb ports on there just plug them in there. You can also plug in any kind of usb device, let’s say a webcam or a wi-fi, dongle or there’s plenty of other usb devices that you can connect the raspberry pi and use it with uh.
I mentioned you can connect it to the internet and on board. There’S an ethernet port so that you can plug it right into your router or into your own home network, so you get on the network or people use that to connect lots of raspberry pi together when they get them onto a network. Now, if you want to power it up, there’s a little micro, usb jack on the bottom corner of it, um that that’s how it gets power, there’s an audio port on the top there that’s uh! If you want to connect speakers to it, you can connect an amp and speakers and you can do an audio project if you’d like there’s this camera interesting camera connector on it as well. There’S an official, raspberry, pi camera board that connects to it and um.
It’S a really really really good camera, and i see some amazing projects that use the raspberry pi camera board and that connector now the thing that differentiates raspberry pi from a typical computer are these ports right here, not typically, a computer doesn’t have these pins broken out. These connections and the this is the main reason that we like raspberry pi, as makers, and that’s why raspberry pi is so popular around here. Is that these pins, let you do so many different things as makers, they’re called general purpose input and output, pins, gpio pins, and they let you control things like the switches you can. You can read the state of switches, you can control lights, you can control motors. All cool kinds of things you can do with it now who here is familiar already with like an arduino or is used in arduino, okay, so you’re familiar with those pins, it’s the same kind of thing, but the best feature of raspberry pi, and i think why Everybody likes, it is the price and if 35 dollars is too much, there’s even a model, a which is different than the the model. I just showed you.
It doesn’t have the ethernet port on it, and it only has one usb port and half the amount of ram. This model is 25. So if you make a project that doesn’t need the ethernet port and doesn’t need as much ram as much memory, then just go with that one and you’re in good shape. You saved 10 bucks. I want to share a quote from a bbc article about raspberry pi.
It says i find things like raspberry pi to be an important thing, trying to make it possible for a wider group of people to tinker with computers and just playing around and making the computers cheap enough. That you can really not afford. Not only afford the hardware at a big scale, but perhaps more important, also a forward failure.
I think that’s the most important thing about raspberry pi. It used to be that if you had a computer and you wanted to tinker around with it, you were at risk of breaking something that could have cost from 300 to 2 000. And if you broke it, that also possibly meant that you put the household computer out of commission, and you would typically wouldn’t do that at 35. You can hack with impunity. You can mess around with it and, if you totally break it, which is actually kind of unlikely, if you totally break it, it was only 35 anyway. This quote is from linus torvalds he’s the guy who started linux and linux is the operating system that is running on raspberry pi.
It’S a free operating system instead of running like mac, os or windows. You’Ve got linux. How many people here run linux already? Okay, a good amount of people huh now and then okay, um, the raspberry pi, runs a specific distribution of linux called raspbian. You can run other distributions as well, but there’s one that the foundation works on and a lot of people work with.
It’S meant for raspberry pi, it’s based on debian. There are other distributions of linux available, other flavors of linux for different purposes. Um. There are even non-linux operating systems out there that you can load on the raspberry pi.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to run windows or mac os on it. I want to talk about some of the things you’re going to need. If you want to start playing around with raspberry pi for one, you need a power supply and the one i’m showing here is your typical um.
You know cell phone, usb cell phone charger power supply just keep in mind that if you get one of these not all are created equal, you do need a certain amount of current to come through it. This one has one amp, that’s fine. The raspberry pi uses 700 milliamps or 0.7 amps and having a one, amp power supply just make sure you have enough current electrical current getting to it means you can also plug in all kinds of extra things, and you won’t have to worry about uh, not having Enough power, so when you look at the power supply, just look at the output, it’ll, say: 5 volts or 5.25 volts, and just look for something that says: one amp or greater or 1000 ma milliamps um to connect that you have to have a usb cable.
This cable that you connect to the raspberry pi, is only used for power. There’S no data. So if you connect it to your computer, you may be able to boot up your pi, but you’re not going to be able to like transfer files or anything. That’S just used for power instead of a hard drive like your computer, would have the raspberry pi uses just regular sd cards.
These are the exact kinds of cards you put in your digital camera. So these are the cards you can buy even at a drugstore. What i like about raspberry pi and the fact that it uses these sd cards is that if you even you’re working on a project – and you build something, it looks great everything’s in good shape and you kind of want to freeze it.
Just where it is. You could take the card out, you can archive that and you can put a new card in. Let’S say something doesn’t work, you put a new card in what i do is i take the cards out.
I copied all the files, all the data onto my computer and save it, and i’ve got a little snapshot of my project right then, and there, if anything, goes haywire from that point, i’ve got a point i can go back to where i know everything worked. Um usb keyboard announced another thing: you’ll need to get started with raspberry pi. I recommend getting something from the junk shelf. If you can find something, i think there are so many usb keyboards and mice out there in landfills, so i would recommend checking out a hackerspace or asking someone who works in an office if they have any extra ones that they’re gon na throw away anyway. I wouldn’t recommend buying them. I feel like there’s so many out there.
Don’T you think same with monitors, find an old junky, monitor and connect it to the raspberry pi um or if you have an old tv that has a composite input, that’s great as well a lot of people also they buy raspberry pi. They pick up a case for it as well. It’S not a requirement. I don’t use a case. I like to live on the edge a little bit, but this one is one that is offered uh. This one is made by adafruit it’s offered in the maker shed as well.
If you want to pick one up, you don’t have to buy a case, because you can also make one this one’s made out of lego. I, like it a lot and recently very recently, someone posted uh files that you can download online to so you can 3d print your own case and it looks like an nes. I think that’s really cool.
I like this project a lot um. This is by thingiverse user tastic, 007 um. It’S a great case and the sd card even comes out of the cartridge slot, which i think i think is really cool yeah. So you got a raspberry pi. You got all parts, you need, you hook it all up. What do you do with it? Well, the first thing you can do is try to learn how to program um.
You can use scratch to do that. It’S a graphical programming language where you can drag and drop different modules around and get animations going, or even some interactivity – it’s pretty powerful, in fact um. But if you don’t want to do scratching you kind of want to get more advanced, you can also use python c c, plus plus um you can. You can use java um. If you really want to go hardcore, you can use assembly uh, there’s a whole guide out there to how to use assembly.
So you, if you wanted to write your own operating system like linus store volts, did you could do that? I want to show you some of the things that people have made with raspberry pi this one um. This is a guy named david hunt in ireland, made this he’s one of my favorite makers. He does a lot of cool stuff with raspberry pi um this one. He just released. This is a raspberry pi cell phone. He took a a touch screen, he put it on top, there’s a battery jammed between the screen and the raspberry pi and it actually it really does work.
It works as a cell phone. He did all the programming and i think, that’s kind of amazing that you can make your own cell phone and what i think is even cooler is a recent development in the realm of raspberry pi is the compute module it’s basically a raspberry pi but smaller? So let’s say you make a cell phone and you make it out of a raspberry pi and it’s pretty big and bulky, and you can’t stick it in your pocket. You want to make a smaller version of it. You can use this smaller version of raspberry pi and if you can do the circuit design – or you know someone who can help you out with that, you can snap a raspberry pi into your project and make it a little bit more portable. Now the compute module isn’t yet available. It was only announced a couple weeks ago and i think this summer they’re going to start to ship them, but this means that projects can go from prototype to product and i think that’s an interesting development in the realm of raspberry pi.
I want to show you one of my own projects i used to live in brooklyn. I biked around the city all the time and i really wanted to do a raspberry, pi bike project. I wanted to strap it to my bike. I wanted to do something and i was riding at night and i realized i didn’t – have a headlight anymore.
I lost it and i said well, i want a raspberry pi powered headlight. Well, how would that be? Well, maybe in the beam of the headlight, i can show information about my ride. So what i did was i hooked up a projector to the battery operated projector to the handlebars of my bike. Put the raspberry pi. I strapped it on there with a battery uh to power it and took it outside, wrote some code, there’s a sensor on the wheel. That will tell me how fast the bike is going or it can show me how far i’ve gone or where i am there’s all different kinds of possibilities. It shows me how many calories burned now. Um, here’s a point of view shot now. I’M usually much safer rider than this, but i had the camera kind of on a big clamp and it was in my way – and i was trying to cycle uh. I don’t recommend doing this in new york city by the way uh, but so that that’s the speed of the bike, it can show any kind of information.
Also, if you look up at make magazine there, that is what’s done by michael castor, that’s a tablet that was made with raspberry pi. I think that’s pretty neat um he’s the guy who actually works in the maker shed so uh. If you find that issue, there’s more information about that project as well, there are so many incredible things i think you can do with raspberry pi. I hope i’ve, given you kind of a nice appetizer. If you’d like you, can check out the book um, i’m happy to take any questions. You have at raspberry pi about raspberry pi, i’m going to step over there so that the next person can set up uh.
It’S actually david, who is doing a great presentation about beaglebone black. You can check it out. Otherwise, thank you very much and enjoy maker faire bye. .