Raspberry PI 2 – Complete Starter Kit unboxing & config (IP/DNS/SSH/FTP/VNC/VPN/HTTP)
English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at TransferSummit 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This blog post will summarize my recent Raspberry PI 2 – Canakit unboxing & configuration. I purchased the kit as a sort of “from-me-to-me” post-holiday gift as I have been thinking about doing so for quite some time and when the Raspberry PI 2 kits fell in price due to rumors of the pending release of the new Raspberry PI 3, I realized the time had finally come to dive into the world of PI.
The first thing you’ll notice if you’re looking to make the same sort of “pre-RPI3 release” purchase, is that this kit does not include the extra attachments required to do DIY electronics projects, and you would have to buy a separate components kit later or find the components piecemeal elsewhere. In hindsight, I would suggest to go with the full kit if you are even slightly thinking you might want to get into the electronics experiments. If you just need a really cheap computer or have a plan for a basic DIY Home Theater or DIY ROM/Emulator Gaming Console, then you can stick to the first cheaper starter kit and have pretty much everything you need (except possibly a few peripherals like console-specific USB controllers if you’re doing gaming).
I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I started out with the basic kit, which I got slightly cheaper on Amazon in a post-holiday sale than what the same kit is advertised for elsewhere.
Unboxing the Hardware
As soon as you take everything out of the box, ensure you have all the components needed. The official hardware guide shows you everything you need to begin (all of which should be included in your kit).
Ensure that you have:
- Raspberry PI (any model will do, but I personally chose 2… with 3 Bluetooth & WiFi are onboard so don’t need to take up USB slots)
- TV or Computer Monitor to hookup to initially (won’t need this later once we are done configuring)
- HDMI cable to plug into both the Raspberry PI and the TV/Computer Monitor
- USB Keyboard to type into the command-line (you’ll be typing alot initially!)
- USB Mouse to navigate to the required applications (and check out the menus and various apps installed)
- AC Adapter (power supply to turn it on)
- 8+ GB MicroSD card or SD card (depending on the Raspberry PI model you chose)
OS Installation
Without an OS, the Raspberry PI is just a curious box of chips and hardware with so much potential waiting to be tapped, but largely nothing more than a fancy paper weight. The first thing you’ll want to do is pick an OS and install it onto an SD card (or MicroSD card) so you can begin experimenting.
As the instructions on the official Raspberry PI site state, your best bet as a beginner will be Raspian (a Linux distro derived from Debian but designed and streamlined specifically for the Raspberry PI). I had trouble with the Operating System that came with the Canakit “Complete Starter Kit” and had to flash (wipe out and reformat) the provided MicroSD card in order to put a later and greater version on to the card. Once I did that, I was finally able to get through the boot process and get it installed. After you follow the steps in the official Software guide you should have done the following:
- (optionally) Flashed the provided SD or MicroSD card to start fresh
- Downloaded the ZIP file for NOOBS “OS installer” (offline version, or files for your chosen OS directly)
- Extracted the ZIP file to your computer to make it available to card
- Setup the NOOBS OS installer (or chosen OS directly) to your card
- Connected all the Raspberry PI hardware
- Gone through the NOOBS installer wizard on your Raspberry PI
- CHANGED THE DEFAULT USERNAME & PASSWORD (can’t stress this enough, do this before you connect it to the internet or even before opening up your device to Bluetooth connections for the first time)
- Connected to your local (home/office) WiFi on the PI (if you have a WiFi dongle or PI model with built-in WiFi)
- Tested your Bluetooth connectivity (if you have a Bluetooth dongle or a PI model with built-in Bluetooth)
- Restarted your PI and ensure the OS comes up successfully and saved all your configuration changes (if not troubleshoot)
CAUTION: Many in the PI community online have mentioned they corrupted their SD card during poweroffs before the PI had completely halted. For that reason you also have to be extra careful if you’re thinking of doing “portable/mobility PI” projects where you’d use an external battery pack or power source to enable the PI to be used on-the-go. When this happens you’ll need to reinstall everything and potentially lose all your files, so be sure to only power down once you have fully shutdown your PI. Thanks to it’s low power usage and heat radiance, most people just leave it running 24×7 once setup, but you don’t need to do this, just take care with the shutdowns and reboots. If you have alot of time-consuming changes or important work you’re doing with the PI that you’d be devastated to lose, remember to back everything up to another device and/or on a file-hosting service. I use a combination of backing up indivudal key files to my laptop, backing up the whole image to an external hard-drive, and all my code changes go to a Git repository (i.e. local, GitHub, BitBucket, etc). I don’t do the files or image that often, but at least once a month or more when I’m particularly active with it and alot of changes are made. Code will be saved for every commit though.
Configuration
There are some things you’ll still want to configure, but you could stop here if you just wanted to make sure everything in your kit works correctly. Completely hooking up to your main TV or PC screen can be a little inconvenient if that screen gets shared with other members of your household, unless of course you have a dedicated screen to use just for your IoT/PI projects. Even so, for practical software and hardware/electronics development projects, you will probably want to proceed with the following useful configurations for remote access to your PI without needing to hookup a keyboard, mouse, screen, audio converter cables, etc: Read the rest of this entry »
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
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