Tinkering Thoughts: Tinkering with Raspberry Pi

Thursday, 16 March 2017

Tinkering with Raspberry Pi

Sometimes when you get handed something new and interesting, you have two choices; you either put it away or you start tinkering over it. If you like tinkering over new and interesting gadgets, you will soon learn one or two things about it (even become good at something).

That is exactly what happened to me when I was first given a Raspberry Pi 2 two years ago by the head of our department.

Raspberry Pi 2

•Small computer
•Make, learn, design in a fun way
•Quad core CPU
•1 GB RAM (Pi 2)
•40pin GPIO
•Micro SD slot
•4 USB ports, HDMI, Stereo output, DSI display
•Micro USB power source

At first glance, I had some idea what it could be but I never knew what interesting things you could do with such a very small thing, almost the size of your BSP Kundu card.

Where to get started
The internet is full of fun projects you can do with Raspberry Pi. Some projects are very basic while some are more advanced and require a few more additional equipment apart from the basic kit. Here are just a few sites that could get you started:

Well the first thing I did was spent at least a week or two doing some research online, looking for tutorials, videos, anything that could help me get started with the Pi in hand. I found a huge plethora of videos on youtube that were great (some were poorly done, too much talking). Here is one that I used to do my first simple project using Raspberry Pi 2.

I found this tutorial simple and very helpful. In this video you are shown how to connect LEDs to a Raspberry Pi's general purpose input-output (GPIO) pins, and how to write Python code to turn them on and off. I thought this looks interesting, why not I give it a try. I decided to follow this tutorial.

Now you need a few things to get started with this simple project.

Raspberry Pi 2 kit
Breadboard
220 Ohm Resistors
Jumper wires 22 gauge (at some point I used jumper wires from the fan I pulled out from an old PC and modified for this purpose)
Some LED lights

I then set out to work. (If you do not know how to use a breadboard here's a great place to start)

All the explanation and steps are done in the video above. Here's what I did after following the video.