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 0: Plug the SD card in

You're going to be installing the operating system for the Raspberry Pi onto an SD card, so pick an SD card that you'll use, and plug it into your laptop.

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/

Plug the SD card back into your computer. Edit the file cmdline.txt to include a directive to hard-code an IP address.

If your laptop finds an IP address automatically, then you can specify any IP address you want for your RPi, as long as it is in the range 169.254.X.Y (anything between 169.254.0.0 to 169.254.254.254).

I added this to the end of cmdline.txt:

ip=169.254.113.200

Then I ran

$ cp cmdline.txt cmdline.direct

Now plug the SD card into the RPi and 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.

First, you'll keep your network cable plugged into your RPi.

Then you'll plug the other end of the network cable into a network router or a network wall jack (see IMPORTANT CAVEAT below).

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:

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If you plug your RPi into a wall jack and you're on a local area network administered by someone else, you may have internet connectivity issues. This is because you're hard-coding an IP address, but some networks must assign IP addresses themselves in order to allow a computer to get outside the local area network. In this case, you'll have to contact a network administrator and ask them to reserve an IP address for your Raspberry Pi.

Software Installation

A list of commands that I ran on the RPi to get things installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-dev
wget http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
python distribute_setup.py
wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py
sudo pip install virtualenv

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo pip install flask
sudo pip install cython
sudo pip install numpy
sudo pip install pandas
sudo pip install scipy

Resources

• http://raspberry.io/wiki/how-to-get-python-on-your-raspberrypi/