Table of contents for 8th Edition in Raspberry Pi The Complete Manual

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting things to happen to computer technology in recent years. As an educational tool, this tiny PC has reignited interest in bare-metal computing in schools and homes all over the world. As a platform for opensource software, it has also inspired millions of people to try Linux – many for the first time. Most exciting of all is the potential to incorporate the device into practical projects, as demonstrated by the tutorials in this new edition of Raspberry Pi The Complete Manual. Grab your Pi and start creating!…

Coming in at a size smaller than a credit card, the Pi Zero is certainly impressive to behold. However, its size does not mean a scale back in performance. The Zero’s 1Ghz, Single-core CPU and 512MB RAM has this board running 40% faster than the original Pi. To achieve such a small form factor and low production costs, the creators stripped back a lot of ports we have come to expect. With only space saving micro and mini ports remaining and no Ethernet in sight, adapters of various kinds will play a vital role in more demanding projects. By ensuring every component is justified in its existence, the Pi Zero is incredibly versatile. Its capability to run full images such as Raspbian, means jumping into a project is as…

It might seem a little alien at _rst glance, but using Raspbian is hardly any di_erent to using a Windows desktop. There’s a menu bar, a web browser, a _le manager and you’d expect, you simply open the Menu and click the applications you want to get started… “It might seem a little alien at first glance, but using Raspbian is hardly any different to using Windows”…

On its own, the Raspberry Pi is a near-perfect mini computer. It already contains a wealth of educational software, a few games, some programming utilities and a number of system tools. But, as with most computers, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. By installing more programs, you can do much more. These programs, known as packages, are as wide and as varied as the developers who originally designed them. In Linux, if there’s a need for a particular program, then someone develops one. They then put it out to the world and make the source code freely available, hence ‘open source’. Once the program has been tested, it will eventually make its way onto one of the many remote servers for that particular Linux distro. These remote…

PiTFT Mini Kit £30 This is a 2.8-inch capacitive TFT LCD touchscreen that’s been specifically designed with the Raspberry Pi in mind by the project gurus over at Adafruit. It’s capable of slotting directly on top of the Raspberry Pi and is about as big as the Pi is itself. There are numerous reasons why you’d want to add such a screen to a Raspberry Pi but they all generally come down to the fact that the Pi is very small and very portable and most monitors are not. While you could remote connect via VPN from a phone if you’re on the go, the screen is connected directly to the Pi and doesn’t involve awkward wireless networking. Also as a touchscreen you don’t need to bring along other input…

Here, we will create a version of the classic Snake game where you move the snake around the Scratch stage using the arrow keys. You control the head of the snake and must avoid a collision with either the body of the snake or the edge of the stage. The snake body grows longer each time you eat an egg. You get points added to your score for eating good yellow eggs and lose points for eating bad black eggs. There are also bonus sprites to eat for extra points. By following this tutorial you will learn to create your own simple sprite graphics, send and receive broadcast events, use a list variable to store data, play sound e_ects, generate random numbers and use sensing commands to detect when a…

Your Raspberry Pi is plugged in. Raspbian is installed on the SD card and you are right in the middle of setting up a wireless print server or building a robot to collect your mail from your doormat. But are you truly getting the most from your little computer? Perhaps you haven’t explored the full set of options in Raspbian, or you’re running the entire OS from SD card, something that can reduce SD card lifespan. Various tools and techniques can be employed to improve performance, from choosing the right hardware to overclocking the CPU. You might even maximise storage space on the Pi’s SD card or all but replace it with a secondary device. Use these tips and tricks to reconfigure your Pi setup and optimise software and hardware…

Your Raspberry Pi’s mobility is usually restricted by the length of the power lead. Rather than limiting it to your desk or living room, however, you can use it for mobile projects as diverse as launching it into near-Earth orbit or monitoring and automating your garden. Of course, to do this you will need batteries, but adding battery power to your Raspberry Pi is simpler than you might have imagined. All that is required are six rechargeable AA batteries (or single-charge alkaline), a battery box with space for the batteries and a UBEC. The latter is a Universal Battery Elimination Circuit, a voltage regulator that will regulate the power supply and prevent damage to the Raspberry Pi, and can be bought for under £10. What you’ll need… AA battery box…

While you’re settling down to enjoy a boxset, there’s always that nagging feeling at the back of your mind – is the baby okay? We need to rely on baby monitors, speci_cally video monitors, in particular those that display footage on an app or by opening an IP address in a mobile browser. Add in some motion detection and alert software, and you’ve got an incredibly useful tool – which, the Raspberry Pi can do for a fraction of the cost. All you’ll need is a Raspberry Pi (the newer the better), and a USB webcam or the PiCam (the NoIR infrared version is even more suited to nighttime use), and a device to view the streamed footage on. What you’ll need… Wireshark www.wireshark.org PiCam module or USB webcam Survey…

Digital picture frames that display a selection of your favourite photos were quite popular for a time, but are now seemingly available only as free gifts when signing up to magazine subscriptions. These tablet-like devices often made for interesting talking points, but were often let down by low memory, a poor user interface, or both. What you’ll need… Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 with Raspbian Jessie Wi-Fi dongle (if using Raspberry Pi 2) Display (official 7-inch Touchscreen Display recommended) Phillips screwdriver Frame and/or stand (suitable options for the official touchscreen display are available at Pimoroni and other dedicated Pi hardware and accessory suppliers) Scripts https://github.com/samuelclay/Raspberry-Pi-Photo-Frame We don’t have to worry about either of those problems with this project. Here we are going to set up a Raspberry Pi with some…

While the Raspberry Pi has enjoyed years of success, there’s always been a couple of things a lot of users wanted. A slightly more powerful CPU that could handle day-to-day computing, more USB ports and maybe wireless to make connecting to the network easier. The Raspberry Pi 3 solves these problems. As it uses the same board design as the Model B+, it has four USB ports, as opposed to the two that were on the original Raspberry Pi Model B. More importantly, it has a much more powerful processor and more RAM, making it ten times faster than the original Pi. The Pi 3 has also added built-in wireless capabilities, which makes connecting to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth a cinch. The new BCM2837 chip is the heart of the Raspberry…

With its small size and cheap price, many people might be fooled into thinking that the Raspberry Pi is only usable for basic tasks, and learning to program on. While one of the primary goals of the Pi was to increase computer literacy at a lower level rather than just learning how to create Excel spreadsheets, the Pi has many other great uses. As the Raspberry Pi is essentially a mini PC, with an HDMI and analog TV output rather than a traditional monitor connection, it can perform many common tasks that a laptop or desktop is often used for. While it doesn’t really have the processing power or RAM to run the latest version of Windows, there are other options. There are a wealth of fully _edged operating systems,…

The ‘RasPi Config’ tool allows configuration of your system that would otherwise be trickier in the Linux environment and it’s the first thing you’ll see when you install Raspbian. Why? Tasks such as setting the date and time or regional settings for your keyboard are often done in a command-line interface with no dialogs, no additional help – for a new user, this is a nightmare. There are some further specifics for the Pi and Raspbian itself, such as: the ability to easily enable overscan for your TV; change the split of memory to the computer/graphics card or even overclock your system to make it a little faster; enable remote SSH access to the system; stop the system booting into the desktop environment among other things. The Raspi Config tool…

If you’re new to Linux, you may _nd using its built-in Apt package management tool a bit intimidating and confusing. The apt-get command is used for installing applications through the internet, connecting to the remote servers – called repositories – which house the programs as packages. But it is used through the terminal command prompt, which can be daunting, so we need an alternative: a desktop_environment interface method of getting hold of packages. This is where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a friendly-looking graphical interface to the apt-get terminal command which allows you to manage your_application_installations, and removals, through the already familiar desktop environment. Think of it as a kind of online shop where you can pick and choose the programs you want and have them downloaded and installed onto…

Is your PC ofiine? Has your Linux box stopped serving Minecraft or Counter-Strike? If you’re out of the house, or even the country, there is no real way of knowing without trying to log in – something you probably won’t be able to do without being on the premises (unless you’re using remote desktop software). A far better way would be to simply receive notifications when your network devices are knocked ofiine, and this is why we turn to NagiosPi, a Raspberry Pi-built version of the popular open source network monitoring tool. NagiosPi is available as a full image ready to be written to SD card, with the real configuration taking place once it’s up and running. Let’s get started. What you’ll need… NagiosPi piimagehub.com/project/nagiospi Win32 Disk Imager bit.ly/L8JdYG Disk…

Playing with electronics and physical computing is a very rewarding task. For a beginner though, the mess of wires and components can become very confusing quite quickly and things like soldering can be a safety concern when children are involved. Bare Conductive has taken the joy of electronics and made it far safer, easier and more versatile with their conductive paint. You can literally draw wires on paper with a paintbrush, use it for cold-soldering or a conductive adhesive and much, much more. There are not a great deal of boundaries to what you can do. Pair this paint with a microcontroller board and you could be creating interactive art, clothing and projects in no time. What you’ll need… Bare Conductive paint (pen or tub) Male to female jumper wires…

Wireless printing has made it possible to print to devices stored in cupboards, sheds and remote rooms. You don’t have to own a shiny new printer for this to work; old printers without native wireless support don’t have to end up in the bin, thanks to the Raspberry Pi. The setup is simple. With your Pi set up with a wireless USB dongle, you connect your printer to a spare USB port on the computer. With Samba and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) installed on the Raspberry Pi, all that is left to do is connect to the wireless printer from your desktop computer, install the appropriate driver and start printing. CUPS gives the Raspberry Pi a browser-based admin screen that can be viewed from any device on your network,…

Take advantage of the UK’s online radio stations, Linux’s popular Music Player Daemon, and utilise a responsive web-server to control it all. The full-sized Raspberry Pis have two built-in audio outputs: audio over HDMI cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack that can sufier interference and noise. The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni has come to the rescue and built a high-quality DAC (digital audio converter) using the same chip as the Hi-Fi berry (PCM5102A). What you’ll need… Github repository http://github.com/alexellis/pyPlaylist pimoroni pHAT DAC Soldering iron, flux & solder Did you know… We wrote pyPlaylist with the Python fiask framework, which is an ideal starting point for simple RESTful websites. The front-end code saves the screen from completely reloading by using jQuery to update the song or…

Torrenting your open source software has a number of advantages – it can be faster, alleviates bandwidth and allows you to share back with the community. Distros, packages and more are available via torrents, and the Raspberry Pi makes for a great tiny, low-wattage, always-on torrent box to better manage your files. What you’ll need… A portable hard drive Raspbian www.raspberrypi.org/downloads PC with a desktop environment with Deluge www.deluge-torrent.org “The Raspberry Pi makes for a great tiny, low-wattage, always-on torrent box to better manage your files” Install Raspbian 01 Raspbian works just fine for our torrent box. Install the image on an SD card and go through the basic setup process, making sure to enable SSH in the advanced options and to disable the desktop. Remote access 02 Type ifconfig…

What you’ll need… A toy RC car with two channels (steering and drive) Adafruit PWM I2C servo driver Female-to-female jumper cables 5V battery power bank Estimated cost: £60 / $100 Components from www.modmypi.com Did you know… You can make this project work with just about any remote controlled car. Follow the guide for more details. Web technologies are moving forward at a huge pace, cloud technologies are bringing mass computing to individuals, and hardware has reached a perfect moment in time where sensors, displays and wireless technology have all evolved into eficient and afiordable devices. We truly are at a point where nearly anyone can take an idea from nothing to a working product in a week and at very little cost. Just like this project, which is fun, quick…

While the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is a step up from the Model B with its four USB ports, the Model A+ is smaller than its predecessor, weighing just 23g (down from 45g) and wielding one USB port. It’s also limited to just 256MB of RAM on the SoC, compared to the 512MB enjoyed on the B+. But don’t think that all of this means that the A+ is inferior. Its 65mm length and lower weight is a clue as to how it can be used. The lack of an Ethernet port meanwhile, isn’t a weakness, rather an illustration of the fact that this Raspberry Pi is designed not for media centres and print servers, but for projects where weight is a factor. Perhaps you’ll mount it on an…

While it looks daunting, setting up the Raspberry Pi for day-to-day use is actually very simple. Like a TV or a normal computer, only certain cables will fit into the specific slots, and the main job really is making sure you’ve got plugged in what you need at any one time. The Raspberry Pi itself doesn’t label much of the board. However, most good cases will do that for you anyway – if you decide to invest in one.…

If you have the itch to do more with your Pi, one of the skills you’ll need to learn to pull off many projects is the ability to edit system files. The command line text editor nano is definitely one of the best tools for the job. Text editors are very basic tools; the clue is in the name in this case. There’s no formatting or colouring or anything of the sort you would get in a word processor, but that’s the point. The kind of files you’ll be creating or editing will generally contain code – code which doesn’t require to be made bold or bulleted. nano removes all of these distractions, but still has a few of the more handy features you’d find in a graphical text editor.…

Situated in the centre of the Studio is the Edit Panel. The panel contents relate to the currently selected sprite. Let’s start by selecting the jelly fish sprite, called Creature1, from the Sprite Collection area. At the top we have the sprite’s image and name, plus an indication of its current stage coordinates and direction. On the left are three animation control buttons. The top button will rotate the sprite, the second switches between left- and right-facing states, and the third turns animation off. Below are three Edit Panel tabs. The script tab is where block scripts are created. Here’s where we’ll drag and drop our blocks, snapping them together in various combinations. To change a sprite’s visual appearance we’ll use the ‘Costumes’ tab. Each sprite can have one or…

The folks at Energenie have created some genius plug sockets that can be turned on and ofivia your Raspberry Pi. You can buy a starter kit which includes the RF transmitter add-on board and two sockets to get you started. The add-on board connects directly to the GPIO pins and is controlled with a Python library. Once everything is installed and set up, your Raspberry Pi can be used with the Pi-mote to control up to four Energenie sockets using a simple program. This tutorial covers how to set up the software, the sockets and how to adapt the program so that it can run on your mobile device. What you’ll need… Pi-Mote IR control board with RC sockets bit.ly/1MdpFOU Desk lamp Accessories Did you know… Every device on the…

Finding the content you’re interested in viewing can take a while. Whether you’re looking for Internet TV stations, video podcasts, audio podcasts or shows syndicated online, taking the time to find and download them can be slow going, particularly if you have a busy lifestyle. You might even have no time to watch after you’ve waited for the download. Thanks to the Miro media management software, we can automate all of this, and with the software running on a Raspberry Pi, you can easily build a compact system for downloading and playing back shows that you have an interest in. We’re talking targeted TV on demand, which makes this project ideal for staying up to date with particular news and trends on a certain topic. What you’ll need… Raspbian Wheezy…

Now that we have our fantastic Raspberry Pi-powered car all wired, charged and ready to go, it’s time to make it come alive. We’re using the best web technologies that the JavaScript programming language ofiers, to harness the natural movement of your hand and wirelessly drive the vehicle. Each little movement of your hand will trigger an event that calculates what the car should do and then sends it over a socket connection. If all goes to plan you should have complete control over your vehicle. What you’ll need… A RasPi car, ready to go An internet connection A reasonably modern smartphone/tablet Pi car source code github.com/shaunuk/picar Did you know… Our code will send instructions to our car over twenty times per second. It will be very responsive to drive…

The Raspberry Pi Zero is tiny, ridiculously tiny. It’s also small enough to be hidden in a variety of household objects in order to enhance their capabilities. Whatever you can find to fit it in, you can turn into some kind of smart machine. Take old game controllers. If you’re anything like us you’ve probably got a couple of boxes full of old computer equipment you just can’t bear to throw away – an Atari Jaguar that hasn’t been touched since the 90s, a Sega Dreamcast which you’re sure you’ll plug in again one day, an old Xbox that lies languishing since you picked up something bigger and better. Turns out it actually was useful to keep them around – it’s time to bring these old systems back to life.…