Raspberry Pi 3 Setup 101

In order to support a number of upcoming projects, I've finally decided to take a step outside of the old/comfortable Arduino space, and do some work with the Pi.  The most immediate use will be to get OctoPi up and running on our new Lulzbot Mini (more on that on a future post).  But before I can do that, I need to get a Pi workspace up and running.

There are a bajillion setup guides for the Pi 3, so I will not attempt to recreate one here.  Below are my notes on the basics, so that when I forget all of this and need to do it again, I only have one place to look for my answers.

HARDWARE:

A quick trip to Amazon has everything you need: board, case/power, memory card:

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
Smraza Starter Kit
SanDisk 32GB MicroSD card

The kit went together easy, but the screws for the case were awfully small - guess I'm showing my age, but I decided to pull out the Donegan Optivisor rather than accidentally scratch the board during assembly...

OS SETUP:

After the board was assembled, it was time for prepping the SD card.  Instructions were found at the Raspberry Pi site:

Downloading and installing the Raspberry Pi Software

I skipped the NOOBS option, and downloaded Raspbian directly, and burned it to the MicroSD card using etcher.io.  All worked as expected, and the Pi booted up without issue.

Basic Pi Configuration:

After booting for the first time, some basic house-cleaning was performed.

From a terminal window:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get clean

From the Raspberry Pi configuration:

Localization:
Changed everything to US/English options, and the appropriate timezone.

System:
Changed the hostname and password, as well as choosing to expand the filesystem.

Finally the Pi was rebooted and WiFi connected via the toolbar app.  After a quick browser check to ensure everything was properly connected to the internet, victory was declared.

In a future post I'll list my notes on installation of xrdp, and getting the Pi to run in a headless manner (already tired of switching my cables, would prefer to remote into the device)...