MICROPROCESSOR AND MICROCONTROLLER: Raspberry Pi

I never saw myself writing this post. But i have done this so many times that i now think i should just put it out there, just another setup post.

NOOBS is short for New Out Of the Box Software. This is where all the beginners of Raspberry Pi should start with. The easy installer can be downloaded as a zip file or using a Torrents from the link.

It has two version offline installer and an online installer. If your raspberry pi is connected to the internet the online installer can be used that takes a very minimum space on the SD Card. The entire selected OS will be downloaded from the internet connection. If your raspberry pi is not connected to the internet than an offline installer should be used that comes pre-loaded with Raspbian and LibreELEC.

Raspbian is one all the beginers should start their Raspberry Pi Experience with. It is the official support OS by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. More info can be read from here. It is extensively covered by the raspberry pi foundation website and makes no sense to reiterate the information here.

There is a way to load the raspbian image directly on the SD Card without using the NOOBS but i will get to that in a later post. (Hopefully)

The setup is a 3 step process.

Step - 1 Format the SD Card
Step - 2 Load the NOOBs
Step - 3 Installing Raspbian

Step - 1 Formatting the SD Card

I use a class 10 SD Card for Raspberry Pi. I have a first generation Raspberry Pi Model B. Cause i have been using it since 2011. Wow 7 freaking years. It is very reliable.

For those of you that might not know this all the SD Memory Card, SD XC Cards basically all SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards complies with SD File System Specification. This SD File System Specification is created by an association called SD Association. More can be read about them here. This association has an open membership and even you can join the association. You can be a member too.

Coming back to point. You would need to download the SD Card Formatter from SD Association Download Page. Once you have installed the same you are set to go.

SD Card Formatter

Using the tool you can select the Card you want to format. When the card is selected certain information is updated. The type of card and the capacity of card is updated by this tool. An appropriate logo is shown based on the type of the card selected.

So to format you SD Card all you need to do is select your card and format using this tool. after certain period of time the operation will be completed and your card is now ready to be used.

Step - 2 Load the NOOBS

Once you download the zip file for NOOBS you can extract the contents right into you SD Card. Below is the snapshot of my SD Card which i setup using the NOOBS.

NOOBS Extracted into the root of the SD Card

Dont mind the dates. As i told i am using an extremely old version of the Raspberry Pi. The NOOBS that you see here is one of the first version that was released way back in early 2013. I just use that for all my purposes and just do an update to my Raspberry Pi.

Well now you might have understood that the OS is the folder where OS related files are stored. If you explore the OS folder you will get something like the following.

List of Supported OS

So as you will find out that apart from Raspbian, other supported OS are Arch Linux, RaspBMC(Unfortunately this was the final and one of greates last version for RaspBMC), Pidora(Kind of Fedora but for Raspberry Pi) and Open ELEC(Primarily used for Media Centre). Each of these OS dictate a separate dedicated post but we will continue with the links for them.

Now that your NOOBS is loaded into the SD Card. Lets move to the Step - 3.

Step - 3 Installing the Raspbian

There are some prerequisite for this step. You would need a screen and a keyboard to work with the raspberry pi. This is the only time in this setup when we will connect a screen to our wonderful Pi. You dont really need a pointing device to work with Raspberry we can perform any or all operation by just using a keyboard.

I performed this installation on a Raspberry Pi 3. So when it is first booted up following is shown.

NOOBS First Screen Raspbian and LibreELEC

As mentioned earlier these are the two default option that comes. This shows that the raspberry pi is not connected to network. We can hit the (w) key to enter into the wifi networks. The screen looks as follows:

Select the Network to Connect to and provide password

In this network selection. You can select your WiFi network and provide password to connect to the network. After a successful connection the Raspberry Pi will connect to the Rpi foundation server and further options are opened. They look as follows:

Options available after connection to the internet

You get more choices.Probably we will discuss these choices in coming posts. Now you can select the OS that needs to be installed on the Raspberry PI. Here i am selecting the Raspbian. So hit 'space' to do a selection and (i) to install.