Here’s a very brief shopping list and collection of links to get your own RaspberryPi system setup.
Parts List
- RaspberryPi – 512MB version
- Enclosure for the RaspberryPi – Clear and contains cutous for all of the ports + GPIO pins.
- WiFi Card – Drivers are included in the latest Raspbian distribution.
- 8GB Class 10 SD card – Class 10 cards have a fast read / write speed.
- USB A to USB MicroB cable – The ‘power cable’ for the RaspberryPi
- USB power supply – High powered USB power supply to drive the RaspberryPi + WiFi card.
- HDMI cable – HDMI cable to connect to HDTV / monitor.
Setting up the SD card
Download the latest Rasbian linux image.
Setup the SD card by following the RPi Easy SD Card Setup guide.
Booting it all up
Plug everything in, boot up the system. If you’re planning to SSH into the RaspberryPi via Ethernet (instead of using a keyboard/mouse/monitor) you’ll have to log into your router and determine what it’s IP address is.
Setting up the WiFi
Assuming everything booted up okay, you’re ready to setup the wireless.
To setup the wireless card to connect to your WPA/WPA2 secured wireless network, edit
/etc/network/interfaces
and add this to the bottom of the file. You may need to remove some existing configuration for
wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid YOUR_SSID
wpa-psk YOUR_PASSWORD
Save this file, and run:
sudo ifdown wlan0
sudo ifup wlan0
Run
ifconfig
and you should see that
wlan0
has an IP address.
Setting up NTP
Accurate time is useful.
sudo apt-get install ntpdate
sudo ntpdate -u ntp.ubuntu.com
Updating Raspbian OS
After everything is setup you’ll probably want to update Raspbian to the latest packages and version.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Updating the RaspberryPi’s firmware
To update the firmware to the latest version, we’ll use Hexxeh’s rpi-update script.
sudo apt-get install git-core
sudo wget http://goo.gl/1BOfJ -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update
sudo rpi-update
You’re done!
At this point you should be completely setup and operational.
If you had any troubles with this please let me know in the comments.
More reading
Here are some resources to do further reading:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Community
http://www.raspberrypi.org
