Raspberry Pi setup

Having bought the boys Raspberry Pi's for Christmas, we decided to try our first project. This is what we discovered:

1. It's important to get a Wifi dongle before you start - you'll need connectivity! These ones work very nicely - Edimax EW-7811UN 150Mbps Wireless Nano USB Adapter - and were only just over £7 each.

2. Also worth buying a powered USB hub - Amazon have the Raspberry Pi compatable (sic) Mains powered 7 Port USB Hub 2Amp(2000mA) with power cable for raspberry Pi Again, cheap at only £16

3. We referred frequently to Raspberry Pi for Kids

4. The actual Pi's we got were Model B's with a pre-loaded SD card.

5. Start up, install Raspbian

6. On reboot, attach the Wifi dongle

7. Choose Wifi Config, scan for network, and select (dynamic IP at present, may change later)

8. apt-get update

9. Install Chromium

10. Try Chromium and confirm connection to internet works!

11. Install Synaptic

12. Install tightvncserver

13. Attach the camera - we bought this one - Raspberry Pi Camera Module for just under £19

14. Try a sample shot - raspistill -o image.jpg

15. Try a sample video - raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000

Both of these save in ~/home (not desktop)

16. How to play the video? Open with omxplayer and make this default

17. Next aim - to set up a remote record facility in line with this tutorial

18. We did have a problem though. We had two Pi's, both of which were working, and then suddenly one stopped. Well, it stopped in the sense of sending no signal to TV via HDMI. Trying various RCA cables brought no success, then - more to investigate possibilities than anything else, we swapped the SD card over. Vision restored. So the SD card was the issue.

19. We tried formatting the card using the details here but it kept insisting the card was locked (even when not).

20. Fortunately we had a spare SD card and were able to install NOOBS on it. Then repeated the steps above and now both are working fine.