Introduction to Pi, Part Two: Unboxing

The latest and greatest Raspberry Pi is known as "Raspberry Pi 3 Model B." With new LAN and Bluetooth features, a souped-up processor, more USB slots, and a Micro SD slot exchanged for the old SD card slot.

Today I am going to describe some of the new features of the the new Pi and provide complete instructions on setting the Pi up.

First, we have the box.
The box is about 4" by 2" by 1". The front bears the Raspberry logo, the name of the model of Pi, the manufacturer's logo, a symbol noting that it can connect to wireless internet, and the Bluetooth logo. The sides of the box are red, and bear the Raspberry Pi logo and the words, "Raspberry Pi 3."
The back of the box contains some information about how to set up the Pi, as well as noting the various hazards that you can encounter while using the Pi, such as explosions or electrocution.

The actual Pi consists of a circuitboard that is about 3" by 2". There are several new features of the 3-B:

The HDMI and Headphone ports and the Micro USB power plug:

Four USB ports and an Ethernet port:

A Micro SD card slot for the system memory

In order to fully set up this Pi, I required the following items:

• Mouse and keyboard, USB-based

• Micro USB cord charger

• Monitor with HDMI cable

• MicroSD card, 32 GB

• MicroSD to USB converter 

• Personal computer

It took several steps in order to set up the pi. 

First, I had to download the NOOBS software from the Raspberry Pi website. 

There are two options to download the NOOBS software: through a Torrent or a Zip file. 

I downloaded both, using the uTorrent software to extract the NOOBS.zip from the torrent file. However, both files took about the same time to fully ready for use. Once it was ready, I selected NOOBS.zip and extracted the files. 

Once the file folder was ready, I inserted my MicroSD card into the converter, then plug it into my computer. I copied all of the files from the NOOBS folder onto the MicroSD, then ejected the converter. I had already formatted the MicroSD to be formatted with FAT32; you should check, and if it's not formatted as FAT32, go to sdcard.org and download the SD card formatter they provide. 

I inserted the Micro SD card into the Pi, plugged the keyboard, mouse, and monitor in, and inserted the power cord. 

Once the Pi booted up, the screen gave me a basic menu of operating systems to install. I chose to go with the simplest one, the Linux-based Raspbian. After selecting it and selecting install, I saw this for the next hour: 

At one point, it reached 100% and froze, which required me to unplug the Pi and restart the process all over again. 

However, when it reached 100% again, it did not freeze. Instead, this happened: 

The screen flashed the Raspberry Pi logo: 

Then, long lines of text began to scroll down the screen.

Eventually, they stopped, and the screen went black.

Then, suddenly, without any warning, the desktop for the Raspberry Pi appeared.

Well, that was fun! But now that it's all put together, what can we do on the Pi? 

The first item of business is connecting to the internet. To do that, simply click the blue circle on the taskbar. It will open Chromium, a version of Google Chrome that works on Linux. From there, browsing the web is practically the same as on any other computer. 

There are several other nifty programs installed on the Pi. There's a glitchy port of Minecraft, as well as some games programmed with Python. To see these, simply click the Raspberry Pi logo in the bottom left corner of the screen. 

Here's a picture of the Tetronimos game. 

There are many other neat features of the Pi that I will explore in the future. I'll be back in the next episode of Introduction to Pi!