Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

Hi everyone! In this blog series, together, we will build many cool things with our raspberry pi (or other gadgets!). Our goal is to just have fun, and learn things. I am a girl, a tech lover, an artist, and someone who loves making things. I want to teach everyone, specially other girls, that you can do whatever you want and building things is REALLY EASY. If I can do it, so can you. Building real-world smart things is fun! Everything we do will be for fun. So, let’s begin together.

To get started, we will need a couple of things.

1. A Raspberry Pi

Any version should work. I have an old v2 berry from 2015 (bought it for $38 then) which I had forgotten about. Still works fine! Depending on what you will have, you just will tweak things a little but all versions should work.

2. Some kind of display with HDMI input & an HDMI cable

You can check all the holes all around your displays and look for something that looks like this these.

• If you have a monitor with HDMI, great! use that.
• If you have a TV that takes HDMI input, you can use that too.
• If you don’t have any of those — like me — see what else you got. Try not to buy anything unless you really need it. We have a projector at home that takes HDMI (which we really *love*, by the way. A Projector which I use it to project zumba workout videos, and my husband and I watch movies with it all the time. Anyway!). It’s a bit inconvenient to use the berry because we didn’t have long enough HDMI cable and the berry hangs in the air when connected, but hey, it works.
• We also had an old monitor at home from decades ago, but it only had VGA input and last time I tried an HDMI to VGA convertor, it didn’t work 5 years ago, so I stuck to our projector instead. But if something like that is all you have, you might be able to make it work. Keep playing with it.
• Now, last weekend we were in HomeDepot and we saw a longer HDMI cable, and thought this would make our berry more mobile — which would be useful to get it to other rooms — but the longer HDMI cables were so expensive (and they are not good for projector anyway because they hurt the signal quality a bit), so we thought that we probably could find a portable display for the same price on Amazon, and we were right! We bought this display for $60 instead which is super fantastic too. (We won’t need it at all for now — until we venture into Kitchen projects later.)

3. Some kind of USB keyboard and mouse

Again, we happened to have a USB mouse and an old USB/Bluetooth keyboard in the old boxes. They are quite cheap and you can also probably find the in your own old boxes, your parents’ houses, or just buy for under $10 on Amazon. If you need to buy one, get the cheapest one out there because the technology is so standard now that everything you get works so well for years.
Like this 14$ keyboard, or this 8$ mouse. These are just examples. keep looking and I bet that you will find even cheaper ones. Just make sure they are (USB) devices.

4. A Micro-SD card

These are tiny storage cards that you usually see in some smartphones, which will act as your “disk”. It’ll have the operating system, the libraries we will use and storage for all the files you may create in your raspberry.
I bought this 32GB micro SD card for $7 and also this $9 memory card reader which I needed to read/write into the Micro-SD card, because I use a Mac.

Remember that the price of these SD cards drops a LOT each month so don’t buy the largest memory cards. Buy something that is like 1–2 years behind the curve. It’ll be large enough, and cheap enough by now. 32GB is more than enough for what I wanted to do for now and it was only $7.

Once you get these two items, you can install a raspberry pi operating system image onto your micro SD. It is very easy to do. I followed these steps: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/

(Which basically means, plug your card. Download the Mac version of the raspberry OS into your Mac. Run it and it’ll let you select your Micro-SD card as destination and will write what it needs into it automatically. Once done, unplug it safely and plug it into the raspberry pi, and you are good to go)

If you get into ANY trouble, let me know and I’ll give more details. Your question may be someone else’s question too, so you will do others a favor by asking it. I promise to answer.

With those above, you have everything to turn your berry on!

Just plug in the HDMI cable and connect to some display, connect the keyboard and mouse, plug the micro-SD card, and after these plug the power in. You will then see a log-in page in your screen. Remember that the username is “pi” and password is “raspberry” in the first log in. After that, you can change the password or username.

Ordering these will take you a few days so go ahead and get them (only if you don’t already have them). From next posts on, I’ll write the guide, to make the time-lapse video below with our berry.

For that project, we will also need some LED lights and a USB camera/webcam. If you already have them, good for you. If not, you can get one of these ($22, they have more useful things which we will use in other projects too!), and one of these ($10). Here’s a teaser for our project’s outcome!