It's alive!

I got back from Thanksgiving travels today and took a couple hours to play with the Raspberry Pi. Below is a picture of all the various bits and pieces that came in the kit.

It was relatively simple to put it all together. The first time putting it all together, I forgot to put the SD chip in, and it took me about 5 minutes to figure that out. One thing that's nice about the Raspberry B+ is that it has more USB ports than the other models. This meant that my worrying about needing a hub was all for nothing. I actually have four USB ports to work with. This meant that I had room for the USB keyboard and mouse from my old desktop, plus the wifi dongle, and I still had one port left to spare.

I attached the Pi to my TV via HDMI for the initial setup. Everything was pretty much plug-and-play through the initial setup. The SD chip came with NOOBS installed, which is a slightly different starting point than either of the two books gave me, but in the end the OS is still Raspbian.

Setting up the wi-fi was pretty straight-forward. There was a link on the desktop that helped me to enter the network password and get connected to the internet.

My first task was to try to SSH into the computer. This actually required virtually no setup. The only thing I needed to do was make sure that the SSH server was activated in the raspi-config. The only other thing was to figure out what the correct IP address for it is. It was easy to look up the address on the Pi, but in the end I'm going for the headless operation, which means that I'll need to find it on my network from my laptop. I've unfortunately forgotten the administrative password to my router, so I'm going to have to ping around to find it. I'm using Putty as my SSH client from my laptop.

My second task was to try to get the Pi to run a VNC server so that I can use the graphical interface if I so choose. This was a tiny bit more complex, but not so much so. The instructions are here: http://elinux.org/RPi_VNC_Server. It took me a couple tries, probably because I mistyped a command or two. But after getting it right, I was able to connect from my laptop using VNC Viewer from RealVNC Limited.

I've got some other things to do tonight, so I'm going to pick it up again in a day or two. But I will need to see if I can log in again from the laptop and run headless. At that time, I'll write up the steps I'm using to do it. From that point, I think I'll move on to playing with the GPIO pins.