Unpack & Initial Setup -- Raspberry Pi

 

 

Hard to believe this is going to be a robot…

 

Most of our parts arrived yesterday, some assembly required…  Here’s the list so far:

·         Raspberry Pi 512 MB + Clear Case + Micro USB Power Supply + Preloaded SD Card + HDMI Cable

·         Arduino UNO R3

·         L298N Dual H Bridge Stepper Motor Driver Controller Board Module

·         2x Ultrasonic Module HC-SR04 Distance Sensor For Arduino

·         4 Wheel Drive (4WD) Arduino Robot Platform

I put everything away until my project manager (Kylie) comes to visit next week, except the RPi.  I thought I’d better get a step ahead of her on that one.  So, I put it in the case (highly recommended, it holds the RPi steady with all the cables attached and protects against static discharge), connected an Ethernet cable from the router, connected the HDMI cable to a monitor, inserted the preloaded SD card (highly recommended for first time users), and holding my breath, plugged it in.  I was reassured quickly with flashing lights and the monitor came alive with the boot process.  All seemed well!  Except since I didn’t have a USB keyboard and mouse I couldn’t do anything with it. 

My intention all along was to use the PuTTY SSH to establish a terminal session, and that actually turned out to be very easy.  After downloading and starting PuTTY, the hardest part is determining the IP address of the RPi.  That’s relatively easy by accessing the router configuration from the PC.  After setting up the terminal session I was in business.  The next task was to install VNC on the RPi and the PC to be able to get the graphical interface.  Following some very good instructions online at “Let’s Make Robots” this turned out to be pretty easy as well.  I installed the tightvncserver on the RPi  and RealVNC client on the PC.  Then ran tightvncserver with the appropriate geometry settings and opened the RealVNC client with the IP address and port (don’t forget the “:1”) and viola, the Raspian graphical interface came alive.  Finally, I set my router to reserve the RPi’s IP address so I will always know it.  This is instead of setting the configuration on the RPi to a static IP, which I haven’t figured out yet.  I’m not sure the reserved IP address will work if I had more than one RPi on the network at the same time, but that’s another day. 

All in all a very successful start for the “engineering” team on the project!  It will get harder since Linux / Raspian and Python are all new to me.