SD card & OS

A micro-SD card is used for most Raspberry Pi's, including the Pi Zero W used for the miniproject. At least 8 GB, Class 10 micro SD card is required--larger and faster SD cards are fine and help the Pi work better.

We don't have micro-USB hubs in the lab, and using the graphical desktop takes too many Pi CPU resources. Thus we strongly recommend using Raspbian Buster Lite without the graphical desktop.

If you're not sure if the Pi is booting successfully, and it must fully boot for SSH etc. to work, consider using an HDMI monitor in the lab. You should see lots of text on the screen and a login prompt when it's done booting. If not, the operating system is probably not installed correctly.

We generally advise NOT to use "Noobs" as it requires the graphical desktop.

Making SD card

On MacOS, Linux and Windows the balenaEtcher program can be used to make the SD card. I usually unzip the Raspbian Lite .zip file before using Etcher as I've found this is more reliable and faster. It usually takes about 3-5 minutes to "burn" the .img to the SD card.

Rebooting and poweroff

Like any computer the Pi SD card can become corrupted if just removing power while it's on. Rebooting is done via

sudo reboot

and powering off is done via

sudo poweroff