Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

Internet of Things is on its course to bring about the next technological revolution. IoT will shake up the conventional way of doing things and make the world smart. In the past 2-3 years, the interest in IoT development boards has increased substantially. This blog on Raspberry Pi Tutorial focuses on one such IoT development board and applications based on it.

This Raspberry Pi tutorial blog will comprise of the following topics:

• Idea behind Raspberry Pi
• What is Raspberry Pi?
• Raspberry Pi Capabilities
• Raspberry Pi Components
• Raspberry Pi OS Installation
• Sense Hat

Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Idea Behind Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is registered as an Educational Charity based in the UK. The foundation was set-up to foster education in the field of computer science. The aim of the foundation was to provide low cost, high-performance computer into the hands of people all over the world, so they are capable of understanding, creating & modelling our progressive digital world.

What is Raspberry Pi?

What? A credit-card sized computer? Yes! You read it right, it’s a fully functional credit-card sized computer which can be plugged into a monitor. The Raspberry pi 3 is based on  Broad-com System on Chip with an ARM processor of around 1.2GHz, a GPU and 1 GB SDRAM. 

Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Raspberry Pi Capabilities

Since Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer, we can perform tasks such as browsing the internet, word-processing, playing games and obviously developing IoT based applications.

Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Raspberry Pi Components

Now, let’s have a look at the different components of the Raspberry Pi 3 – B model:

Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Configuring Raspberry Pi 

• The first step in configuring the raspberry pi would be to install the raspbian operating system. Go to https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and select the raspbian O.S.

• Once you download the raspbian operating system, you would need to format the S.D card and flash the raspbian O.S onto your S.D card. So, you would require a disk imaging software. Go to sourceforge and download the Win32 Disk Imager.

• We would also require a graphical desktop sharing system, so that we can control the Raspberry Pi with a graphical user interface. One such graphical desktop sharing software is VNC Viewer. So, we’ll go ahead and download VNC Viewer.

• After completing all of the above steps, we’ll finally insert the SD card into the micro SD slot and connect the power cable to the Pi.

• Next, connect the Raspberry Pi to the monitor & plug-in the power cable. Click on install Raspbian and follow the instructions to install the Raspbian OS on Raspberry Pi.
• Next time when you connect the power source to the Raspberry Pi, it’ll start searching for open wi-fi networks. So, we’ll turn on the mobile hot-spot in our system and let it connect. Once, the raspberry pi is connected to our wifi, we’ll take the dynamic IP of the Raspberry Pi and feed it into the vnc viewer dialog box, and voila we can start working with Pi.

Raspberry Pi Tutorial: Sense Hat

One of the brilliant things about the Raspberry Pi has always been the ability to attach external physical hardware to the Raspberry Pi. There are many add-on hats to the Raspberry Pi, one such HAT is the Sense HAT.

The Sense HAT comes with an 8×8 RGB LED matrix, a five-button joystick and includes the following sensors:

• Gyroscope
• Accelerometer
• Magnetometer
• Temperature
• Barometric pressure
• Humidity

You can attach the Sense Hat to the raspberry Pi as shown in the below image.

Go through this recording of Raspberry Pi Tutorial where our instructor has explained the topics in a detailed manner with examples that will help you to understand the concepts better.

I hope you would have found this Raspberry Pi tutorial blog informative and helpful. I would recommend you to stay tuned to Edureka channel to learn more about IoT applications. 

Now that you have gone through our IoT Tutorial blog, you can check out Edureka’s IoT Training Using Azure. As per the Cisco report, IoT will generate $14.4 trillion in value across all industries in the next decade.  All of this will lead to better job opportunities. Edureka’s IoT Certification Training aims at covering all these new concepts around the Enterprise IoT Application Development.  

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section and we will get back to you.