Raspberry PI first steps

Marco

12 years ago

As every and each true geek, i get myself a Raspberry PI. First error, i ordered only the Raspberry, should have bought also a case (i will buy one soon, but with added shipment costs…).

First choice to make, a cheap decent SD card. I bought a 4GB SD card, 6 class (meaning 6 MB/sec – higher the better). The OS image (Raspbian – yet another debian clone) has a considerable size, almost 2GB, so anything smaller than 4GB is probably not a very good idea…

Powered it up, and first problem, even though i had an HDMI connection to my TV screen no output was detected – shit! Besides no output, everything seemed normal and in my router it was registered a new device, so ssh to the assigned IP and could log easy with the default pi/raspberry credentials…. (yes i did tried with another cable and still no output), strangely enough if connected to a monitor with the same HDMI cable works fine and also the TV reads perfectly from other HDMI inputs (Laptop, PS3)….

Still about this, i have found that you can do a lot of tweaking in Raspberry HDMI settings, i will thinker with the various options and then report back:
http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt#Video_mode_options

After boot you must (or at least should) re-size (or make another) partition to reclaim the entire card space. After that i wanted to connect an external HDD, as documented and expected, if connected directly to one of the Raspberry USB ports there is not enough power and the Raspberry crashes and reboots (so does the HDD). So, i went out to get a self powered cheap USB hub…

I connected the USB Hub, and plugged in the Raspberry to it, worked fine. And then the HDD, also powered up nice and no more crashes and reboots as expected. But the damn thing wasn’t recognized… why? Yet another rookie mistake… the micro USB input on the Raspberry is power input only, doesn’t support data, so i fixed it with another external power adapter providing power to the Pi. I think another cable running from the USB hub would also do the job.

Of course i did setup root ssh access (as all good security practices advise not to do, but what the heck i like to live on the edge). Boot, and minimum setup complete, time to move to the real fun stuff 🙂

Update:
Raspberry PI with Raspbian “Wheezy” connected to a LG 50PV350 trough HDMI. The TV set reports “no signal” and shows no image. To fix this, open the SD card boot partition edit config.txt and add

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16

this will set the PI output to HDMI always even if no device is detected, group 1 means TV (2 is monitor) and mode is set to 1080p.

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