Raspberry Pi 3, Get up and running – INITIAL SETUP

First things first lets get setup! This post will go through all the necessary steps required to get your Raspberry Pi 3 setup and connected to the internet, enjoy!

This is the first part of many posts that will be turning a Raspberry Pi 3 in to an Aquaponics (Or Hydroponics) monitoring system. I previously built one using a Raspberry Pi 1 and the time has come to rebuild and improve that original design. You can see photos of the original one on the aquaponicpi Instagram account there is also a aquaponicpi Twitter account for this project as well.

Everything in these guides is being performed using a Windows 7 machine and should be the same for all modern versions of Windows. Linux users can also perform exactly the same tasks using slightly different software, but that is not covered in this guide. I do not have any apple devices to use for this besides an Ipad so expect limited detail IOS wise over the entire project, though I will show how to SSH in to your Raspberry Pi in a future post.

Personally I have access to any Linux distro using VMware, Windows 7 & 10, multiple Android devices and an Ipad so if you need details specific to your own devices just ask!

It is expected that you have these items before we begin,

·         A Raspberry Pi 3!

·         HDMI display (Monitor/TV)

·         USB power cable

·         Suitably sized micro SD card

·         Wireless Keyboard and mouse with USB Dongle

·         Access to your SD card on your Windows machine.

SD Card Formatting

Firstly, we need a SD card to install an operating system on for our Raspberry Pi 3. The SD card size required depends on what you intend to install on it, 8GB is recommend for NOOBS installation and 4GB for a normal operating system image installation.

 In this case I am using a 32GB SanDisc Ultra SD card which you can purchase here from Amazon UK for under £9.
 I am going to be doing an image installation of Raspbian, which is a port of a Linux Debian based operating system that has been optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware (though not quite yet for the Raspberry Pi 3 at the time of writing).

Once we have our SD card of choice we need to format it, this can be done using a small program downloaded from the SD Association here. 

Download the zip file, extract and then run the included setup file. Install the SD Formatter software following the on screen prompts.  

Run the SD formatter software after installation and you will be presented with something similar to the window shown below.

Click on the option button and change FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT from OFF to ON.

Next I have named my SD card but the name will be changed once we install an operating system on the SD card, so it is not a necessary step.

Click format and you will be given two warning pop ups, click OK on both of them.

After a short while you will be shown a third pop up confirming the success of your SD card format along with information on the file system type and the total space available on the SD card.

The space you actually have available never quite matches the manufacture’s description, so do not worry that this shows lower than the expected 32GB in my case or whatever it is for you.

If we now go to My Computer we can see the SD card shows up formatted here, shown in the screenshot below, under the name RPI. That’s all there is for this part, now it’s time to download an operating system and mount it on to our freshly formatted SD card.

Download an Operating System

The operating system we are going to install is Raspbian and it can be downloaded from here.

Download the “RASBIAN JESSIE Full Desktop image based on Debian Jessie”, I downloaded the .zip instead of the torrent version but both will give you the same thing just via different download methods. The download is roughly 1.3GB in size.

Once your download is complete; navigate on your computer to where you downloaded the file and extract the file in the .zip.

You will end up with what is shown highlighted below, this is a .iso file which is just a disc image.

Mount the Operating System

To get our shiny new operating system on to our SD card we will need to download one more small program named win32diskimager which can be download from here.

Download and install this program and then open it up and you will be presented with the window below.

Ensure you select the correct drive from the device drop down box, in my case the SD card is [G:\].

Click on the blue folder icon just to the left of where you selected your SD card and navigate to where you extracted the .iso file (disc image) previously downloaded, select it and click Open.

That’s it we are ready to install the image on to the SD card, click the Write button and you will be given a warning pop up click Yes to continue and watch the progress bar move as it goes to work.

This can take some time so be patient, when it is done you will get a success message. If you then navigate to My Computer again you will see the SD card is now named boot and it shows much less space available.

Insert the SD card in to the Raspberry Pi!

The SD card is now ready to be put in the Raspberry Pi 3 for our first boot up, remove the SD card from your windows machine and put it in to the SD card slot on the bottom left of the Raspberry Pi.

Now turn your Raspberry Pi over and plug in your HDMI cable connected to your display. Then your Wireless Keyboard and Mouse USB dongle and last the power cable, a red led will light up on the Raspberry Pi and a green one will blink away.

Look to your screen and you should see a whole bunch of text moving across the screen as the Raspberry Pi boots up and eventually you will be presented with your Raspberry Pi 3 desktop!

Connect to the Internet

The first thing you will want to do is connect to the internet so we can update and upgrade the operating system and software. Using the Raspberry Pi, click on the icon of two computers up in the top right corner and find your wireless network

Click on the SSID of your network and you will be asked for your Pre-Shared Key or your Wi-Fi password.

Enter your password, notice the two computers icon changes to a wi-fi icon showing your connection strength, you are now connected and should have access to the internet!

You can test your connection by using the browser, clicking on the blue and white globe icon on the task bar to the right of the menu button will open the default web browser try going to http://www.google.co.uk.
You could also test your connection using the terminal command line by typing

ping google.co.uk

and then pressing enter, you will be shown on screen how long it is taking to send 64 bytes of information on screen repeatedly if connected otherwise if your connection is bad you will get

ping: unknown host google.co.uk

as a response you can stop it running by press key combination of  Ctrl + C.

I want to use an Ethernet cable to connect to my network and the internet so I  have plugged that in and then in the terminal typed

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down

followed by pressing enter, which will disconnect my wi-fi and use the Ethernet connection instead.

The enter key should always be pressed to confirm your command when ever using the terminal.

If you entered this command without plugging in an Ethernet cable then you have just shut down your connection to the internet. You can restart your wireless internet connection by typing

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

Lets get up to date!

Now there is an active connection to the internet the Raspberry Pi can be updated, in the terminal type

sudo apt-get update

if any updates are available you will see them download.

Lets up grade!

Follow this with

sudo apt-get upgrade

If any updates are available will then they will download, you may be asked to confirm you want to use the disk space required, just type y and press enter to accept.

Find our your IP address easily

Now the next thing we need to know is the Raspberry PI`s current network IP address, we can get this by typing

hostname -I

In my example my ip address is 192.168.0.10, the IP is what will be used to remote connect and SSH into the Raspberry PI from another device.

Check SSH is running

To check SSH is active and what port it is running on (Default 22) type

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh status

Change default Passwords

We will be shown the information above showing it is running and listening on port 22, before we remotely connect we should change our default passwords, typing

passwd

in to the terminal will ask for the current users’ password and entry of a new password followed by confirmation.

su passwd

Typing the above will ask you for confirmation of the current root password and then to change it. Default settings have no password for root account so just press enter for the password and if you are using the standard user account named pi then your default password will be raspberry. It is important to change these passwords, definitely before we connect the Raspberry Pi directly to the outside world later on where not changing the defaults passwords could result in other people causing all sorts of trouble by accessing your raspberry pi.

All done!

That is it we are all set-up, the Raspberry Pi 3 is up and running, connected to the internet, SSH is running and we know which on which port and the IP address to use to remotely connect from another device. We will cover remote connecting to your Raspberry Pi in the next post! 

Thanks for reading, any suggestions or comments? Any issues you encounter? 

Please drop them below and I will respond as soon as possible.

Show support for aquaponicpi and like the Facebook page! 

Click on the icon below to be taken to aquaponicpi on Facebook!