After waiting all last summer to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi I finally was able to order one and get it shipped to me from Adafruit Industries last September. When it arrived I was interested to see what it would take to get it up and running and found that it was very easy. The biggest challenge was to determine what associated parts to buy to have a useable configuration.
When I ordered the pi I hadn’t looked into what items I would need to make it a running system. I figured that I could pull what was needed from spares I had on hand. For my initial test configuration I used the HDMI connection on one of my existing monitors, a usb keyboard and mouse I had sitting around, a power supply from my cell phone, and a 4GB SD card.
After some initial successful testing I decided to upgrade to an 8GB SD card and to add wifi so that I didn’t have to tethered to my ethernet switch. To this I added an existing externally powered USB hub that I had so that I could have the wifi dongle, keyboard and mouse all connected at the same time. I also power the pi off the hub.
I decided that while I liked the barebones look of the Raspberry Pi that having a case would be a good idea to protect it. After looking at some options I decided on the Pi Tin which I ordered from Sparkfun.
By December I had decided on a project for the pi which required sensor data collected using an Arduino and displayed using openFrameworks. To get the data from the Arduino to the Pi I used a Sparkfun Bluetooth Mate Silver and an bluetooth adapter.
In January I was far enough along on my project that I decided to purchase a second Raspberry Pi for some testing. For this pi I got the pi and the same case from Adafruit Industries and added a 7 port externally powered hub, a wifi dongle and another IOGear bluetooth adapter all purchased from Micro Center.
On the hardware side both Raspberry Pi's and the components I have all have been working very well together. I would suggest using the Tenda wifi dongle as it has been working well and costs much less than the Trendnet dongle.
From a software perspective I am running Raspberrian Linux and openFrameworks. More on the software in a future update.
Rapsberry Pi #1 Configuration
- Raspberry PI Model B 256 K
- Pi Tin Case
- 8 GB Class 10 SD Card
- Belkin F5U581-MOB 4 Port USB hub 2.5 amp Power Supply
- Trendnet 150 Mbps Micro Wireless USB Adapter
- IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB Adapter
Raspberry Pi #2 Configuration
- Raspberry Pi Model B 512K
- Pi Tin Case
- 8 GB Class 10 SD Card
- Manahattan 7 Port USB hub 2 Amp Power Supply
- Tenda W311 105 Mbps Wireless USB Adapter
- IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB Adapter
The above links were good as of the original posting date. I apologize if they don’t work at some point in the future.
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