Raspberry Pi Tips & Tricks

A collection of stuff to help you get started quickly and right footed.

Getting Started

This guide is under construnction. Feel free to contact me via chris@linuxuser.at with feedback and ideas.

Essential Websites

These are some of the essential websites around the Raspberry Pi:

Community and Q&A

  • Raspberry Forums, the primary community website with lots of people. Questions are answered quickly and you’ll find many friendly hackers.
  • Reddit - Raspberry_Pi, mostly showing off pictures of projects
  • Stack Overflow, a great community for source code related questions and answers
  • The MagPie, a free monthly magazine
  • There’s also an active IRC channel #raspberrypi on freenode

Wiki Pages

Learning

Prerequisites

Preparing the SD Card

Programming with Python

Python is a versatile, easy-to-learn programming language. Most recommended! It’s already installed on all Raspberries, as well as part of all Linux and OSX distributions. You can start the Python interpreter via the python command:

$ python

Now you can simply enter Python commands and they’ll be executed:

>>> print("Hello World")
Hello World

>>> 1 + 2 + 3 + 4
10
>>>

Download Geany (geany.org/download):

$ sudo apt-get install geany

Geany is a free Python IDE which makes it super easy to write and test Python code. A good IDE will save you countless hours! Other free IDE’s include Eclipse, ...

Python Tutorial

A great way to get to know Python is to just try it out. Make sure you set aside enough time (2 hours min.)!

Type out each and every command in this tutorial yourself!. Trust me on this. It makes it super easy to follow your curiosity and play with code variations (eg. what happens if i change this...?).

Have fun!

Python GPIO Programming

There are several libraries which make it easy to work with the GPIOs:

Tips & Tricks

SD Card Performance

SD cards have very varying performances, and sometimes lower-class SD cards are faster than higher ones. See http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards for details on verified speeds for specific cards. You can test a card in the Raspberry with these commands:

# Test Write Speed
dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.tmp bs=500K count=1024

# Test Read Speed
dd if=~/test.tmp of=/dev/null bs=500K count=1024

# Cleanup
rm ~/test.tmp