Evolution of a Blog

This blog has evolved as I have as a maker. It starts at the beginning of my journey where I began to re-tread my tires in the useful lore of micro electronics and the open-source software that can drive them. While building solutions around micro-electronics are still an occasional topic my more recent focus has been on the 3D Printing side of making.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Frustrated by the RPi Wait - Ordered Another!

I finally got frustrated by the wait for my Raspberry from Allied Electronics and RS Components so I ordered on from CPC in Farnell.   It was a little more expensive but they had one in stock.   A little case from eBay and I am good to go.   Someday when I get the original Raspberry that I ordered you will find one of them on eBay.   I do wonder a little about AE and RSC.   Why not add a quid or even two to the price and offer some customer service?????

Anyway, having an RPi in hand I connected a mouse and keyboard dongle, attached it to my TV, and gave it some power.   It booted up as advertized with the raspi-config menu displayed from whence I:
  • Expanded the root so that my entire 16gb card would be utilized,
  • Set the timezone to London, and
  • Rebooted the device.
This first reboot after expanding the root will take some time so I needed to be patient.

Working on a 42 inch TV was a little awkward so I connected the Rpi to an AP that I have for just such purposes and continued with some initial configuration via an SSH session:
  • Restarted raspi-config and asked it to update itself now that we were on the network.
  • Once the above was done the menu option for overclocking turned up so I set it to the medium setting.
  • As I am working almost exclusively from the command prompt I also set the video memory to the minimum setting.
In my next post I will describe the configuration of the RPi to match the development environment that I have been using on my Ubuntu Laptop.


The velcro dots are part of my sophisticated mounting system for the USB hub that will ride on top of the RPi.   To the rear you can see the three leads for the serial console connection that I will talk about later.  Power is coming from the left and the AP for wireless connectivity is coming in from the right.

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