For my birthday I got a few Amazon gift cards as gifts, and I decided I'd get a Raspberry Pi for fun. I don't remember where I first heard about the $35 computer, and before ordering I still didn't know much about it. I am currently waiting for my Pi to arrive, it's still about a week out, and I decided to journal my experience from the beginning.
I am interested in the Raspberry Pi because I want to learn more about computers in general and programming in particular. I fit firmly in the "Millennial" age group but I have never written a line of code in my life. The fact that I haven't engaged more deeply with computers is a little strange, since I excelled in math and science in school, I can speak and write fluently in a foreign language I picked up later in life, and I've always had access to tech resources. I also love puzzles of all kinds and thrive on problem solving. I avoided computer science in college because I graduated from high school right after the crash of the dot com bubble in the late nineties and was scared away from the industry. Now I am envious of elementary school kids that get to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math; kids who have the opportunity to be tutored at a young age in coding. I am therefore starting essentially at elementary school level of computing.
I'm not starting completely from scratch, even though I've never coded before. I have set up a home network including network attached storage for LAN and WAN sharing. About a year ago I read an article by Neil Stephenson called In the Beginning was the Command Line and was completely enthralled. It inspired me to try out Linux for the first time. The first distro I tried was Arch, figuring the best way to learn about Linux would be to jump into the deep (Arch is considered to be a distro for advanced users because setup is completely manual). I had the time of my life taking an eight year old laptop that wasn't exactly top of the line when it was new and turning it from a sluggish Windows XP machine into a sleek, fast Arch system. It took me a while to get to the point where I could browse the internet, including several times restarting the whole process from the beginning.
Now I'm excited to give the Raspberry Pi a try. I'm confident I could install an operating system and get it to the point where I could browse the internet and watch Netflix and make voip calls without doing any further research, but instead my goal is to learn coding and building new things with the Pi at the center. I plan on starting with some Python practice after I get the Pi up and running and connected to the internet.
As I said before, I searched Amazon and found a supplier that would ship me a Raspberry Pi 2. The price is probably more than what it would be if I bought the Pi from the official distributors, but since I was using gift cards it was free anyway. It should be here by next Friday. I didn't buy anything extra with it, because I figured out I already have on hand pretty much everything else I need to get started. I intend to use a charger from an old cell phone to power the device (Raspberry Pi does not come with any sort of power supply or even an on/off switch). I have 16 gig micro sd card and adapter that aren't currently being used for anything (there is no hard drive built in to the Raspberry Pi, so the operating system and any files have to be stored on removable media). I'll hook the Pi to my tv with an hdmi cable I already have (there is an hdmi port on the Pi, but it doesn't come with a display of it's own). I have a usb keyboard and mouse that aren't being used since I switched to a wireless set. And of course I have a spare ethernet cable and open port on my router (no wifi built-in to the pi, but there is an ethernet port and you can add wifi through a usb port). I plan on getting a feel for things before I go out and buy a dedicated display and enclosure. If all goes well my next blog post will be written and posted using my new Raspberry Pi. Stay tuned for updates on what I end up doing with my Raspberry Pi 2.
