We're going to get started using the latest Raspbian Lite, we don't need the graphical system which takes up precious CPU cycles. Start by downloading the latest Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) Lite operating system image.
Burn the operating system image to a Micro SD Card. Directions are available on the Raspberry Pi site.
Mount the SD Card on your computer. Go to the boot partition. You want to create an empty file in that partition named ssh. This will tell Raspbian to enable SSH.
Enable Networking
For networking, you can use either a cable or WiFi. You can find more information about this in our Raspberry Pi Network Setup guide.
Enable Interfaces
After properly unmounting ("ejecting") your card for you computer, go ahead and place the microSD card in the Pi and supply power to boot it up. It may take a few minutes before it's available.
On your computer, SSH into the card using the following:
This is a great time to change your password.
passwd
Update the Raspberry Pi
Update the Pi
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get upgrade
and
sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip
and
pip3 install --upgrade setuptools
Upgrade Script
We put together a script to easily make sure your Pi is correctly configured and install Blinka. Although Blinka isn't required for this to work, it's nice to have and this script also enables several other interfaces that are required for this project to work. It requires just a few commands to run. Most of it is installing the dependencies.
cd ~ sudo pip3 install --upgrade adafruit-python-shell wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/master/raspi-blinka.py sudo python3 raspi-blinka.py
If your system default Python is Python 2 (which is likely on a first install), it will ask to confirm that you want to proceed. Choose yes.
