How to: Build Your Own System with Raspberry Pi

A few days earlier, my boss gave me a little box and told me to explore it. I didn’t know what was he up to so I just opened the box to see what was in there, and I was surprised to see a Raspberry Pi micro computer wrapped in a piece of plastic paper.(I was struggling because I had never seen such a thing and I didn’t know why my boss gave it to me…)

Outer Appearance

The packaging is awful. The one who pack it just used some plastic paper to wrap the box of the Raspberry Pi.

I hope that the product inside is not broken having been violently treated by the express company.

Get off the plastic, and you can see that this is the Raspberry Pi generation 3, model B.

Open the box and take the Raspberry Pi out. The inner packaging is also very awful, there is only one plastic bag protecting the product.

Here are some pictures:

I have heard about the Raspberry Pi but have never touched it. People who use it are real geniuses. This micro computer is as big as a regular card and smart geeks use it to make all kinds of splendid programs. They can use the Raspberry Pi to take photos and videos, or feed fish and control electric appliances in a long distance.

One: Install the System

This is the first time I use the Raspberry Pi so I decide to install the system first and see if there are anything simple that I can play with.

Except for the Raspberry Pi, you also need to prepare a SD card, a network cable, a router and a computer.(the picture below is taken when I finish connecting all the wires and installing the system)

First, download the Raspberry Pi system from the official website.

Second, transfer the system into the SD card.

Download Win32 Disk Imager and you can easily transfer the system into the SD card. My SD card has the volume of 8G and this is enough if you don’t use it to make big programs.

When the transfer is done, put the SD card in the Raspberry Pi’s slot for the memory card, and then you can connect the Raspberry Pi with your displayer, mouse, keyboard, and network cable and power source.

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol of my router is on, so when I connect the network cable with the Raspberry Pi, I can see that the Raspberry Pi has gotten its IP address.

When the displayer is available, you can log in with the default username of “pi” and the default password of “raspberry”. I suggest that you change the password and start using the Root account for the later registers.

Two: The Secure Shell Protocol

The problem I have now is that I don’t what to share one displayer for the Raspberry Pi. The easiest way to solve this problem is that I control the Raspberry Pi through the SSH (the Secure Shell) on my own computer. However, the Raspberry Pi generation 3 has the SSH function off at the beginning.

After searching on the Internet, I find that the solution is to create a blank file named “SSH” under the system’s root directory. I tried but it didn’t work…(By the way, I find that the website cable is not connected very well afterwards, so maybe this is the reason why it didn’t work. You can still try the solution above and follow my instructions below if it does not work.)

I searched again and then entered the system settings through sudo raspi-config where I can turn the SSH on. Now I can log in the account of the Raspberry Pi through Putty on computers in the local area network.

Three: Let’s try it!

Now the Raspberry Pi has its own system and can be controlled in a long distance, so I’m thinking about making something that is simple and easy to get a result.

1. You don’t need to download the installation package of the Raspberry Pi if it is connected with the Internet. The system will automatically find the corresponding installation package if you out in the installation order, which is a big convenience.

2. Create two downloading directories to put in the files downloaded successfully and unsuccessfully respectively.

3. Edit the directory’s permission. You’d better do it under the Root account. If not, put “sudo” before the orders.

4. There are three configuration items below, where you can edit the directories and visit the white list’s address of this BT downloader. Since I’m only using it in the local area network, I directly write the whole segment of my router.

That’s all the work. Restart the transmission service after saving.

Then it comes the minute to test the result. The convenience of the transmission is that it is visited through web and the default port number is 9091. Also, the whole segment in the local area network is saved when editing the white list, so you can log in by opening the browser on any computer in this network and put in the username and the password(the default password is “transmission”).

Here you can create download missions. If you don’t want to keep your computer on in the night, you can directly use the BT downloader in the Raspberry Pi.

Conclusion:

It is overall smooth for my first experience of using the Raspberry Pi. The Linux it uses is Debian system, so it is the same for the Raspberry Pi to start Root as Debian does. It will be helpful for rookies to know some basic knowledge of Linux.

If you want to make some significant moves, you must master a huge range of knowledge. The Raspberry Pi can satisfy geeks’ curiosity and it is also a great tool for learning to write programme. If you find that there are mistakes in my article, please point it out and I will humbly take it!