Halfacree - Raspberry Pi User Guide

Raspberry Pi User Guide

Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree

Raspberry Pi User Guide

This edition first published 2012

2012 Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree

Registered office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.

The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are registered trademarks of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in the book.

Google Drive is a registered trademark of Google.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-118-46446-5 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-46448-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-46447-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-46449-6 (ebk)

Set in 10 pt. Chaparral Pro by Indianapolis Composition Services

Printed simultaneously in Great Britain and the United States

Publishers Acknowledgements

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Editorial and Production

VP Consumer and Technology Publishing Director

Michelle Leete

Associate DirectorBook Content Management

Martin Tribe

Associate Publisher

Chris Webb

Executive Commissioning Editor

Craig Smith

Assistant Editor

Ellie Scott

Project Editor

Kathryn Duggan

Copy Editor

Kathryn Duggan

Technical Editor

Omer Kilic

Editorial Manager

Jodi Jensen

Senior Project Editor

Sara Shlaer

Editorial Assistant

Leslie Saxman

Marketing

Associate Marketing Director

Louise Breinholt

Marketing Manager

Lorna Mein

Senior Marketing Executive

Kate Parrett

Composition Services

Compositor

Erin Zeltner

Proofreader

Wordsmith Editorial

Indexer

BIM Indexing & Proofreading Services

About the Authors

Eben Upton is a founder and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and serves as its Executive Director. He is responsible for the overall software and hardware architecture of the Raspberry Pi, and for the Foundation's relationships with its key suppliers and customers. In an earlier life, he founded two successful mobile games and middleware companies, Ideaworks 3d Ltd. and Podfun Ltd., and held the post of Director of Studies for Computer Science at St John's College, Cambridge. He holds a BA, a PhD and an MBA from the University of Cambridge.

In his day job, Eben works for Broadcom as an ASIC architect and general troublemaker.

Gareth Halfacree is a freelance technology journalist and the co-author of the Raspberry Pi User Guide alongside project co-founder Eben Upton. Formerly a system administrator working in the education sector, Gareths passion for open source projects has followed him from one career to another, and he can often be seen reviewing, documenting or even contributing to projects including GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Fritzing and Arduino. He is also the creator of the Sleepduino and Burnduino open hardware projects, which extend the capabilities of the Arduino electronics prototyping system. A summary of his current work can be found at http://freelance.halfacree.co.uk.

For Liz, who made it all possible.
Eben

For my father, the enthusiastic past, and my daughter, the exciting future.
Gareth

Introduction

Children today are digital natives, said a man I got talking to at a fireworks party last year. I dont understand why youre making this thing. My kids know more about setting up our PC than I do.

I asked him if they could program, to which he replied: Why would they want to? The computers do all the stuff they need for them already, dont they? Isnt that the point?

As it happens, plenty of kids today arent digital natives. We have yet to meet any of these imagined wild digital children, swinging from ropes of twisted-pair cable and chanting war songs in nicely parsed Python. In the Raspberry Pi Foundations educational outreach work, we do meet a lot of kids whose entire interaction with technology is limited to closed platforms with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that they use to play movies, do a spot of word-processed homework and play games. They can browse the web, upload pictures and video, and even design web pages. (Theyre often better at setting the satellite TV box than Mum or Dad, too.) Its a useful toolset, but its shockingly incomplete, and in a country where 20% of households still dont have a computer in the home, even this toolset is not available to all children.

Despite the most fervent wishes of my new acquaintance at the fireworks party, computers dont program themselves. We need an industry full of skilled engineers to keep technology moving forward, and we need young people to be taking those jobs to fill the pipeline as older engineers retire and leave the industry. But theres much more to teaching a skill like programmatic thinking than breeding a new generation of coders and hardware hackers. Being able to structure your creative thoughts and tasks in complex, non-linear ways is a learned talent, and one that has huge benefits for everyone who acquires it, from historians to designers, lawyers and chemists.

Programming is fun!

Its enormous, rewarding, creative fun. You can create gorgeous intricacies, as well as (much more gorgeous, in my opinion) clever, devastatingly quick and deceptively simple-looking routes through, under and over obstacles. You can make stuff thatll have other people looking on jealously, and thatll make you feel wonderfully smug all afternoon. In my day job, where I design the sort of silicon chips that we use in the Raspberry Pi as a processor and work on the low-level software that runs on them, I basically get paid to sit around all day playing. What could be better than equipping people to be able to spend a lifetime doing that?