Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Raspberry Pi IV”.
Good afternoon, everyone welcome to maker faire. This is getting started with raspberry Pi, which is a biddable whirlwind. Tour of the Raspberry Pi in about 15 minutes. There’S a lot of information to talk about, so I’m going to go as fast as I can. The raspberry pi will be talking about and we’ll be talking about what you know what it is, what you can do with it.
What you need to get started that sort of thing? My name is matt richardson, i’m a contributing editor for make magazine and i’m also the co-author of getting started with raspberry Pi, which I cooperate with a good friend of mine, Sean Wallace, and we put everything we could. We knew about raspberry pi into this book about how to get started with it and a lot of what I’m going to talk about is in this book. But then we kind of take it a little bit further to talk about projects and stuff that you can do with raspberry pi. So I guess I think the first question to answer right now is what is a raspberry pi? Basically, the raspberry pi is a computer.
You plug in a keyboard, monitor mouse and you can use it like a keyboard just like you know, and your laptop or whatever you can even get it online like your computer and surf the web. If you wanted to, but it was meant for education. It was built to help students get into hacking computers and playing around with them. If you want to talk a little bit about specs in the parts of the Raspberry Pi, i’m going to point out a few highlights of the board.
First of all, the processor on the board, the main part that does all the hard work is the same kind of processor you’ll, find in a cell phone and kind of an older generation cell phone, maybe around like a first iphone. If you like, the technical specs, it’s a 700 megahertz arm11 processor, it’s got 512 megabytes of RAM. It has a video output, so you can connect it to a monitor or TV.
On the bottom. You see a hdmi cable input there to output to an hdmi monitor. You also have a composite output for older analog television. So if you have an old TV, you can hook a Raspberry Pi up to it, maybe repurpose it there’s a USB port and that’s how you’ll hook up a keyboard or I’m sorry, a keyboard or mouse. You can also hook up by any other kind of USB device. Webcam bluetooth, dongle, Wi-Fi dongle, most different kinds of USB devices can plug into the Raspberry Pi, which is one of its strengths. Another component you’ll, find on the board is the Ethernet port. This is how you’re going to get it online. You if you hook it up to your router at home, it’ll get an IP address and it’ll get online.
That way, if you don’t have a hardwired connection to the internet, you can also use a USB Wi-Fi, dongle they’re only about ten dollars. You plug them in and you can get the Raspberry Pi on a Wi-Fi network for only ten dollars. It’S not bad. There’S a little power jack on the board, also, it’s a micro USB jack, so it looks like a USB jack for a device like a cell phone or something, but the only way this is used is for power for the Raspberry Pi. So you want to keep that in mind: you’ll need a power jack to connect to that there’s also an audio output on the Raspberry Pi. If you want to do a project that involves outputting audio, there’s another port on here, that probably isn’t going to look very familiar to you.
It’S called a CSI or camera serial interface port. It’S how you can connect the camera to the Raspberry Pi inside your cell phone. There are connectors from the main board to connect to the camera component inside the cell phone you’re, usually not disconnecting, and connecting that because it’s all in case inside your cell phone on the Raspberry Pi, the connector, is available to you and the raspberry pi foundation makes A fantastic camera that you can plug into that and you can get like really high definition, great quality, video out of it, but I think the reason why we, as makers really like the raspberry pi or few couple of few features, I’m going to talk about now. For one there’s, the the GPIO pins, who here has played with an Arduino before got a few people? Okay, so Arduino it has pins on it and these pins you can control, you can turn them on and off or you can read whether something is turned on and off you can hook up a switch. You can hook up a sensor. The same is true with the Raspberry Pi and you’re, going to use these pins on the Raspberry Pi to hook up different kinds of electronics to the device, and typically this is not something you’ll see on a normal computer.
It’S one! It’S one difference from typical computers. You don’t really have these pins sticking out of your compute, so these pins, let you prototype they. Let you integrate them into your projects, they’re fantastic, but I think the absolute best feature of the Raspberry Pi and one another reason why we’re really excited about. It is its price, and i know i don’t i’m not trying to sell you guys, i’m not trying to make this an infomercial or anything, but i think with the price is significant because it lets you integrate this into your projects pretty easily.
It’S not that expensive compared to other components you could use on a project and especially if you want to integrate a computer into your project. This is probably your lowest cost option that you have and if $ 35 is too expensive, there’s also the model a which only has one USB port. It doesn’t have the ethernet jack and it has a half the amount of RAM as the model be the memory that you’ll use, that your programs will use the the model. A also has the advantage is that it uses a less less power. So if you don’t need that ethernet, you don’t need that extra memory and you’re building a project.
It may be better idea to look at the model a and integrate that into your project. I want to bring up a quote from linis torvalds that he was talking to BBC News and he said 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 I think, and making the computers cheap enough that you really cannot only afford the hardware at a big scale, but also perhaps more important afford failure. I think that’s.
The critical thing here is being able to afford failure. If you had to use a 300-dollar computer, which is probably on the lowest end of a computer, if you want it to hack and tinker and build something with it, you might be afraid to do some things with it, because you don’t want to lose three hundred Dollars what’s fantastic about the raspberry pi? Is that allows you to afford failure you if, first of all it’s hard to break it? But if you do, it was only thirty-five dollars. Linda’S Torvalds is the founder of Linux, he’s the guy who started it all and that’s the operating system that’s running on the Raspberry Pi, just like you may use Windows or Mac OS on your computer.
This runs linux and it even has a desktop environment with a desktop and icons and everything you use your keyboard and mouse to click around. You don’t have to use that if you don’t want to, there are other operating systems. You can load on the device, but the raspberry pi foundation, the people who make raspberry pi they offer of an official distribution official operating system called raspbian.
That has a lot of people working on it. A lot of people are using it. So if you ever have any trouble with anything, there’s, definitely someone out there, who probably has the answer the question you’re looking for so I do recommend, checking out raspbian and it’s pretty much the default that you’ll find on everything. I want to talk about a few of the things you’re going to need. If you want to get started with raspberry pine for one you’ll need a power supply 5 volts you’re going to want at least seven hundred milliamps over point 7 amps. This one has one amp.
It says he Oh says 1a on it. You just want to make sure that it has enough power enough letting enough current through it, some cell phone chargers, don’t quite give it enough power. So you just going to want to check it and make sure it’s going to give your Raspberry Pi enough power. If you don’t give it enough power, it can act a little strange, sometimes and many times when people ask me about why the Raspberry Pi isn’t working. I I ask them about their power supply.
First, to connect the power supply on the Raspberry Pi you’re, just going to use a regular, USB cable microUSB on one side, so it can connect to the Raspberry Pi. That’S pretty basic you’ll find that anywhere. Instead of a hard drive, the Raspberry Pi uses an SD card. This is exactly the kind of SD card that you’re going to put in a digital camera and the kind of SD card you can also find in a drugstore. If you need to grab one, I recommend at least 4 gigabytes and a class for card works really really well keyboard and mouse is useful to have that. Won’T you want to get USB versions of those you don’t need them necessarily and a monitor is nice as well. There are some optional things as well.
A case is helpful if you want to put your Raspberry Pi into a case. This is a case from Adafruit. Looks like this is about ten dollars.
You find those in the maker shed my maroney over there. They sell beautiful rainbow cases as well. Now you don’t need to buy a case for your Raspberry Pi, but if you do want to protect it, you can also build your own case out of Lego and we see lots of amazing cases out there. I think there’s some fantastic creativity in people who build cases for raspberry pi. I think we could round them up on the magazine one day.
So how do you work with it and how do you use it? Well, one way to use it is to program it using scratch, which is a graphical programming language, where you can really drag and drop different elements around the screen to get a character on a stage or a graphical element. To do things any way you want. You could build a game, you can build an animation with it, but if you don’t want to necessarily use a sort of drag and drop environment, you want to try coding. You can also use Python c programming languages.
You could use java if you wanted to as well and if you’re just getting started with coding, and you haven’t written a line of code in your life and your and you want to try it for the first time i recommend trying out Python because there’s plenty Of support for using Python, along with raspberry pi, so want to show you a few things that you can do with raspberry pi. I want to start with one of the things that I did, because I was so eager to integrate the Raspberry Pi on to my bike. I biked around New York City and I wanted to be able to make a headlight for my bike. That showed me information about my ride, so what I did was I took the Raspberry Pi.
I slapped it on to a piece of wood and put that on my bike. I put a battery pack and some circuitry and connected it to a sensor on the wheels, and I put a projector on to the front of my bike, which I connected to the Raspberry Pi. So the Raspberry Pi was controlling the projector. What I had was a dynamic bike, headlight, which I tried out on the streets for the first time, and this is video of me trying it for the first time, what it’s showing is it’s showing the speed of the bike in the beam of the headlight? Now it doesn’t have to show the speed you could reprogram it to. You know, get gps directions if you wanted to by the way, I’m not such a bad cyclist. I had the camera right where my torso should have been, and I was kind of like you know, teetering I’m a much more conscientious cyclist. Usually so, as I was saying, um you don’t have to use the speed, it could be. The calories burn.
The distance you’ve gone could be. Your altitude could be text messages appearing in your bike headlight. This is just one possible application for us, berry, pie and, what’s great about it, is that only thirty-five dollars. I could just slap it right on the bike and you know that’s it while you’re here at maker faire, there are plenty of Raspberry Pi projects.
If you just look around behind you, there’s an organ pedal: music synthesizer, that’s running Raspberry Pi! If you go inside nice, I inside zone a on your map there and you go downstairs. There is a 3d printer, that’s running Raspberry, Pi and also downstairs inside the New York Hall of Science inside the new york hall of science near NYC resistor, one of our hacker spaces built this interactive game. They call it the future crew and it’s got like all these olds old equipment that they put raspberry PI’s into and you can plug and change things around. They’Ve got a rotary telephone.
You can dial things in the whole thing. Is this interactive game? It’S all based on Raspberry Pi, so it’s it’s absolutely fantastic. While you’re here you can get raspberry PI’s over here or in the shed in the maker shed down that way. There’S tons of cool raspberry, pi accessories.
If you want to get started, there’s also a nice raspberry, pi kit that you can get that has everything you need to actually includes the book. If you want to pick up the book, there’s an address as well, if you want to pick it up later, otherwise I will let the next speaker setup and I’ll move over here. If you guys have any Raspberry, Pi questions. Thank you so much for coming to my talk and thank you for coming to maker faire have a great day bye. .