Raspberry Pi

Ordered the CanaKit Raspbery Pi starter kit from Amazon, mainly because it came with a breadboard and a case.

NOTE: "cronus" refers to my Mac OS X laptop.

Installing Operating System

The kit came with an 8GB SD card with the NOOBS operating system (for beginners at raspberry pi) pre-installed. Nice touch, but I didn't want to use NOOBS, I wanted to use a Raspbery Pi version of Debian so that I can hack this thing up. I downloaded an image file from http://www.raspberrypi.org/ (it was a zip file, containing an img file).

Step 1: Find your SD card

I plugged my SD card into my Mac OS X (running 10.8), and ran this command to list all the devices:

$ diskutil list
dyld: DYLD_ environment variables being ignored because main executable (/usr/sbin/diskutil) has __RESTRICT/__restrict section
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Cronus                  249.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *7.9 GB     disk1
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 NOOBS                   7.9 GB     disk1s1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *16.7 MB    disk2
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Flash Player            16.7 MB    disk2s2

That means my sd card is at /dev/disk1.

Step 2: Unmount card

Now I unmount the SD card:

$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
Unmount of all volumes on disk1 was successful

Step 3: Write image to SD card

For the last step, you use dd (disk formatter utility) to write that image to your SD card:

$ sudo dd bs=1m if=2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk1
2825+0 records in
2825+0 records out
2962227200 bytes transferred in 1571.202055 secs (1885325 bytes/sec)

The above command took 27 minutes on my system.

Resources

• http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/mac.md
• http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

Interfacing with Headless Raspberry Pi

Step 1: Modify Raspberry Pi boot sequence

Following http://pihw.wordpress.com/guides/direct-network-connection/

Modify your cmdline.txt to include a directive

ip=169.254.113.200

appended to the end of the line. Then run

$ cp cmdline.txt cmdline.direct

Now you'll boot with a hard-coded IP address. This will work because we're connecting the computer and the RPi directly.

Step 2: Cat5 Network Cable

Get a standard network cable and connect the laptop to the RPi. Remove the SD card from the laptop once you've modified cmdline and put it in the RPi to boot it up.

Step 3: SSH

Now you can SSH to the IP address you specified:

First Steps with Raspberry Pi

Configuring your RPi

When you first SSH into your RPi, it will notify you that you have to run a config program to set up your RPi initially.

I picked the first menu item, and that required a system reboot:

Putting RPi on a Network

As a next step, we'll want RPi to be internet-capable so we can use aptitude to install some packages and get this operating system tuned up.

Once you plug your RPi into the network router, it'll still have the same IP address, so you can still SSH to it the same way:

$ ssh pi@169.254.113.200

but now the RPi will have internet connectivity: