Demo Setup Step by Step

OK, let’s just quickly go over visually what we need. And so of course, we need a Raspberry Pi. And so I like this particular case because it has a– or this particular kit because it has a fan. It has the power supply. It has a micro HDMI cable, on-off switch, case, directions, heat sinks, and it actually has a Raspberry Pi also.

Next, you’ll need a SD card, and pretty much any name brand SD card will work. There are some problems with no name brand or off name brand SD cards networking preferably. So I would just pick a name brand. They’re not very expensive. As you can see, at the time of this video, this one was only $7.50. And make sure you have that SD adapter, too, for your computer.

Next, if you’re going to reuse one, I would suggest downloading the SD memory card formatter from the SD memory card association, and you can just Google that and it will come straight up. balenaEtcher is the way that we are going to burn our image to our SD card. And simply just click on that. It’s the big green button to download and install that. And then we’ll go from there.

And then, once we have all of those things, we can go to Downloads, and here we have the choice of NOOBS or Raspbian. And so with NOOBS, you can just– the NOOBS installer has an installer with it that will install it to the SD card. The Raspbian– you need to use the balenaEtcher, which is what I prefer to use. And so just click on that, and it will take you to this page, where you have your choice of images.

And so depending on what you’re going to be doing, so Raspbian Buster lite has– basically, it’s just a command line. There is no desktop, whereas Raspbian with recommended software has something like a writing program, sort of normal desktop programs. So in between those two is the Raspbian Buster with desktop. But then, it doesn’t have a whole lot of software with you. So depending on what you’re going to be doing, if you’re just going to be programming, Raspbian Buster lite or Raspbian Buster with desktop. If you’re going to be actually using it as a desktop, then I would get with the recommended software.

Now, you have a choice here of download turn or download zip. I find the download zip is excruciatingly slow. So you can use a BitTorrent program like qBittorrent. QBittorrent is a free software BitTorrent program that you can download and then be able to download your Raspbian image much faster. That’s what I recommend doing.

So next, open up SD card formatter and insert your card. And then, you’ll notice that it automatically shows up when you insert it, and then you can change the name here. But I think actually when Raspbian installs, it changes the name to boot again. And then click Format and yes, and then that will format the card. When it’s done, click OK. And then you can close that and then cancel.

Next, we’re going to start etcher, which will help us install Raspbian actually on the card. If you’re using NOOBS, then you would just simply open up the NOOBS installer, and that will do the install to the SD card. Here, we’re going to select our image, and so we want Raspbian Buster. Click Open, and so that automatically appears there. Our SD card is actually there already, and then we’re going to click Flash. And then it will write that to the SD card, and then it will verify it.

Once that’s done, you can close that. And if we go to our PC, you can see the etcher automatically unmounts that disk. So you can pull it out. And here, you can see we’re at the Raspberry Pi desktop, and we just need to click through on a few things here.

We’re going to change this to English. I should say we’re going to change this to American, for all my English friends. Set our time zone, and then use English language and use English keyboard, or US keyboard, in my case. Then, click Next. And then we’re going to set a password and then hit Return.

And so here, it will be trying to find a Wi-Fi network. I’m actually hooked up with ethernet, so we’re going to skip this. And then, next, we’re going to do our software update. And this will take a few minutes. Once that’s done, click OK. And then you’ll need to restart your Raspberry Pi. So click Restart.

So let’s take a look at a few things here. So on the very top here, we have our terminal. So if we want to use that, our File Manager, our web browser, and then if we click on that Raspberry Pi, we have a number of different categories. So we have programming, internet, we have the Chromium browser– that’s our internet browser– VLC Media Player, which will play sound and video, Photo Image Viewer, some accessories– so down there, we have SD Card Copier if we want to copy our SD card.

How to get help– and so we have Debian, we have the Raspberry Pi Projects, things that I’ve talked about already, and even the Magpie magazine. And then how to set our preferences– and we’re going to take a look at one thing here, and you’ve noticed that we didn’t have any word processor, and that’s because I put the medium ones, which doesn’t have a word processor.

So here in the Options window, I typed in word, and so I was looking for a word processor, and the one that came up was abiword, which is a lightweight word processor. And so we’re going to install that to see how that works. And so we’re also going to install some of the plug-ins available, too, so we have cross-compatibility. Then, we’re going to click OK, and that will start loading those packages.

And so here, we have to put in our password and then hit OK. And in this instance, we’re not going to do it because we will show you actually another way to add software. One thing I did notice was I actually had to have the caps lock on for my Raspberry Pi to accept the password. So there seems to be a little bug there. So let’s click cancel and cancel.

And so now, let’s go over to a terminal. So if we would like to install it from the command line, first thing we have to do is type in sudo su. Hit Enter. And now, we have root access, so we’re going to type in apt-get install abiword. And then hit Enter and then y for yes. So once that’s done, we can close that window. We’re going to go back up to the Raspberry. Click on that. Go to Office, and there you can see our abiword is installed. If we click on that, now we have a word processor.

And then finally, let’s just look at the web browser before we move on. And you can see, it is just a normal web browser, and so nothing unusual here. Oh, one other thing before we gg– if you see– here’s Bluetooth, so if you have a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, you would add them here. The up and down arrow is the internet, and you can turn on and off your Wi-Fi and connect to a Wi-Fi hub here. Then, of course, your sound, and then your time and date. And then to shut down, we’re going to go to the Raspberry Pi and then Shut Down. And let’s move on to the next section.