Update Your Pi to the Latest Raspbian

Your Pi will need to be running the latest version of Raspbian. This tutorial was written using Raspbian Stretch (Nov. 2018). Checkout our guide for Preparing an SD Card for your Raspberry Pi if you have not done so already. After the installation is complete be sure and run the following commands to make sure your installation packages are up to date. 

$ sudo apt-get update -y
$ sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Install pip3

pip3 is already installed with a full Raspbian installation, but the Raspbian Lite does not include pip3 so it needs to be installed as shown below. We will use pip3 to install the necessary CircuitPython libraries.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Install adafruit-blinka

$ sudo pip3 install adafruit-blinka

Install mcp3008

$ sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-mcp3xxx

This guide was first published on Jul 29, 2012. It was last updated on Mar 16, 2024.

This page (Necessary Packages) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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