Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Raspberry Pi III”.
You’Re here now for getting started with raspberry pi, it’s a 15-minute whirlwind tour of the raspberry pi everything you need to know to get started with it. So what you need to have how it works, what the parts are and what it’s capable of, and what kind of cool raspberry pi projects you can see all around uh maker faire. So, as i said, my name is matt richardson, i’m a contributing editor for make. I’M also the author of getting started with raspberry pi a book i co-authored with my good friend sean wallace um, if you’re interested in what i’m talking about and you’re interested in knowing more about raspberry pi, there’s a ton of good information in here um. This is available in the makershed and it’s also available online. So what is a raspberry pi? Essentially raspberry pi is just a computer. You can plug in a keyboard, monitor mouse and you can use it like you’d use any other kind of key computer. Now you can also plug it into the internet and get it online, so you could just surf the web on this. If you wanted to now, it was a computer that was designed for educational use by a non-profit foundation in the united kingdom, but luckily all of us can buy them.
It’S not just restricted for educational use and, in fact, makers love raspberry pi as well. Now, if you want to talk about specs a little bit here at the core of the raspberry pi is a processor. It’S a lot like the processor you’ll find in a cell phone, in fact, like an older cellphone, maybe a first generation iphone uh. If you like, the nitty gritty specs, it’s a 700 megahertz arm.
11 processor has 512 megabytes of ram in the model b um. There are two video outputs on the raspberry pi. The one on the bottom that you see is an hdmi video output. You see hdmi connections on all modern television sets these days uh and you see them also on computer monitors as well. That’S how you’ll connect it to a monitor. You also have a composite video out. That’S an analog output and that should look familiar to you. It’S the kind of video input, you’ll still see on tvs, but they’re kind of fading away.
Now – and you don’t see them as frequently, but if you have an analog tv or a digital tv or a digital monitor, you can connect it to the raspberry pi with either of these connections. There’S a usb port. There are two usb ports on the raspberry, pi and model a this is how you’re going to connect a keyboard or mouse um. You can also connect any kind of usb peripheral.
If you have a usb webcam, you can connect that to the raspberry pi as well. You can also connect little wi-fi dongles. Most usb devices will connect to the raspberry, pi and you’ll be able to use them in one way or another.
As i mentioned, it can get online and on the raspberry pi, there’s an ethernet port, so you can connect it to your wired ethernet and your wired network. That way, so you can get your raspberry pi online. If you don’t want to connect it to the you, don’t have a access to a wired network.
You can also use one of those usb wi-fi dongles, you plug it in there, as i mentioned before, um those are pretty cheap. Those are only about ten dollars. If you want to get the raspberry pi onto a wi-fi network, um there’s a little power jack on the bottom left side of the board um, it looks like it’s a it’s, a micro, usb port.
So it’s a kind of micro. It’S the kind of usb port you’ll find on some devices like cell phones, but it’s only going to get power through this port. So this is how you get power.
You’Ll need a micro, usb cable. It doesn’t do any kind of like usb communication. It won’t talk to your computer through this port. It only gets power through it, there’s also an audio jack.
If you want to connect speakers or make a sound project with raspberry pi and there’s this interesting connector called the camera serial interface now inside your cell phone there’s a board and that board connects to a separate camera board through a connector. Now we usually, as normal consumers, don’t use a connector like this, because it’s something that’s usually already connected inside a product like a cell phone, but we have access to it on the raspberry pi. And if you want to get a camera that connects to this port they’re available from the raspberry pi foundation, they have an official camera board that connects to the raspberry pi through that port. But you can also use a usb webcam and find an old one on the junk shelf if you have one to plug in, if you want to do a camera project with the raspberry pi.
One of my favorite features of the raspberry pi are these pins. That are along the top up here. These are gpio pins, they’re called general purpose, input and output pins. Now, who here has an arduino who has worked with an arduino before okay, so on the arduino? You have these pins, these gpio pins.
Now these pins, that are pins, that you can control, you can turn things on and off or you can listen to whether they’re on or off, and the same is true with the raspberry pi. If you hook up a switch to these pins, you can use software to check whether the switch is turned on or off or if you have an led or a lamp or a motor. You can turn those devices on and off with these pins.
That makes it a little bit different than a normal computer. These pins are why we like raspberry pi as makers, because it lets us integrate this into our projects, and we can you know if we’re building something with electronics. It makes it easy just to attach a computer to the project. I think, though, the best feature of the raspberry pi is its price. Now i don’t work for the raspberry pi foundation.
I don’t gain any benefit by trying to sell it to you, but i think it’s fantastic that the price is so low. It means that it’s not that expensive. If you want to integrate a full on computer into your project, if you’ve got a project that you’re building – and you know you know – you want to dedicate a computer to it – you don’t have to take a computer away from anything else. It’S just a 35 component.
In some cases it could be one of the cheaper components in your project and, if 35 is too much, i know i’m sounding a little bit like an infomercial here, there’s also a 25 model that has only one usb port. Here. It doesn’t have the ethernet jack and it has half the amount of memory that the model b has and this one, this cheaper version, this less expensive version is called the model. A the model, a has an advantage in that.
Not only is it less expensive, but it also uses less power than the model b. So if you’re dedicating your raspberry pi to a project – and you don’t need ethernet and you don’t need a lot of memory, you may want to consider using the model b. You’Ll save some money and you’ll save some power. I think this idea of a less expensive computer board like this is very very important and linus torvald said to bbc news.
I find things like raspberry pi to be the 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 cannot only afford the hardware at a big scale. But you also perhaps more importantly, afford failure and i think that’s really what it’s all about is being able to afford failure. You can experiment with the raspberry pi with impunity.
You don’t have to worry about breaking something: that’s expensive there. If you do. First of all, it’s really hard to break something like this i mean i i’ve done some crazy stuff to my raspberry pi’s. I haven’t broken a single one of them yet, but you can experiment and not worry about if you’re gon na break it or not, because if you do it was only 35 now that quote is from linus torvald’s he’s the founder of linux, which is the free And open source operating system, which is what the raspberry pi runs on just like your computer, may, have mac os or windows. Raspberry pi most of the time runs on linux and it has a desktop environment just like mac or windows. So you can use your keyboard and mouse. It has a web browser and everything you don’t have to use the desktop environment. If you don’t want to, you can just use it if you’re comfortable, using the command line terminal and just text input.
If you’d like there are other operating systems, you can load onto the raspberry pi, but the raspberry pi foundation provides an official distribution called raspbian, which you can load on and it’s fully supported and that’s where most people are using raspberry pi, it’s the software. Most people use – i want to show you a few things that you’re going to need to work with raspberry pi, so that you can get started really quickly for one you’ll need a usb charger like this. Most cell phone chargers will be okay, but you want to look out for one thing: it’s got to be 5 volts and it’s got to provide enough. Current and you’ll see that it’ll say 1a after the output there.
That means 1 amp. You need about 1 amp to run raspberry pi and not all five volt charges chargers will give one amp. It may also say: 1000 ma, that’s milliamps.
It’S the same thing. You can go as low as 700 milliamps or 0.7 amps, but you may run into some weird behavior if you plug in a lot of devices or you’re, using a lot of power on the pi, of course, to connect that power supply to the unit. You’Ll need a usb cable.
It has to have a micro usb hook on the other side so that you can hook it up here and instead of a hard drive, the raspberry pi uses an sd card. This is exactly like the kind of sd card you’re going to put into your digital camera and what’s cool about it, is it’s the same kind of sd card you can buy in a drug store nowadays. So if you ever fry one of these – and i have messed up my sd cards before by messing around with things – i should have been uh you you could just go, you can re-flash it. You can put new operating system on it and if you really mess it up, you can just buy a new one as well, and these are cheap, of course, a usb keyboard and mouse. Those are very helpful if you’re getting started because then it’ll work just like a normal computer, a monitor either an analog, monitor or digital one is fine. It has hdmi and composite out, as i pointed out before now, you don’t have to have a case, but i think cases are really nice to have this one i’m showing on screen and the one i have in my hand here.
This is from adafruit uh pimeroni. Over there. They sell some amazing rainbow colored cases that are pretty cool as well. There are cases available in the maker shed.
As i said, you don’t have to have a case and you don’t have to buy a case, but if you don’t want to buy a case, you can also make a case out of lego if you want. So if you’re going to work with a raspberry, pi, you’re, probably going to want to program it you’re going to want to make it do the things you want to do, there are a few different ways to do it for one there’s: an open source, uh programming, Environment, that’s aimed at younger kids, who are just learning programming. It’S called scratch. It’S like a drag and drop programming environment where you use your mouse and keyboard where you can drag things around and you can animate a little character on a stage if you’re a little bit more advanced, you can use languages like c python java. All those will work and, if you’re looking, if you haven’t written a line of code in your life and you want to get started, i recommend checking out how well python works on the raspberry pi. So let me show you a couple quick projects before i have to get off stage um.
I wanted to integrate the raspberry pi into my bike. I bike around new york city and i wanted to get some information about my ride. While i was riding so i built uh what i call a dynamic bike headlight, i strapped a raspberry pi to the bike, gave it a battery and i added some circuitry so that there was a sensor on the wheel. So i could tell how fast the wheel was going.
I connected it to a projector, a battery operated projector on the front, handle bike of the bar of the handlebars, and i took it out on the street. It’S a dynamic bike headlight. So it’s showing me the speed of my bike ride in the beam of the headlight as i bike around now, i i’m normally a pretty conscientious cyclist and i’m stay stick to the bike lanes, but for this demo i had the camera right where my torso is Supposed to be, and i’m stretching around it – and i i’m kind of like teetering back and forth – i’m usually a much better cyclist than this. But this gives you a good idea of the first person point of view when you’re using this now it doesn’t have to show the speed of the bike.
If you added a gps chip – and you added the right programming, it could give you navigation instructions when to take a left when to take a right, could show text messages um, it could show you how many calories you burn. What your altitude is, how how far you’ve gone any number of things this dynamic bike headlight, could show here at maker faire, there’s a ton of awesome, raspberry pi projects, um there’s a uh down in the uh. If you go inside nice, i inside zone a and you go downstairs, there’s a ton of great makers, many of them using raspberry pi. One of them is tom. Callaway from the fedora project he’s showing off a pie based 3d printer. Also, a local hackerspace, nyc resistor set up their interactive multiplayer game called future crew.
Where you have these old antique devices that you can plug different things into and there’s a whole game involved. You want to check that out check that out. It’S also inside nyside. So there are plenty of awesome, raspberry pi projects to check out around uh maker faire.
I recommend just exploring you’ll see it everywhere. If you want to find out more about raspberry pi, the book is available online. It’S also available here in the maker shed. I don’t have much time left.
I want to let the next presenter get set up. So i’m going to step aside here. If you have any questions – and we can talk all about raspberry pi thanks for coming and have a great time at maker faire, .