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Raspberry Pi Operating System

Raspberry Pi now provides a 64-bit Debian-based operating system (OS) via the Raspberry Pi Imager. The OS is quite good, though for some uses Ubuntu seems to work equally well if not better.

Base Operating System

  1. Install and start the Raspberry Pi Imager.
  2. Select the latest 64-bit Raspberry Pi image and write the image to the micro-SD card. Be sure to configure WiFi and SSH services on the image if needed.
  3. Boot the Raspberry Pi on the micro-SD card and log in.
  4. Upgrade and install a few dependencies, general tools, and applications: 
    sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install emacs apache2
sudo systemctl reboot

    The Pi should reboot. Log in.

  5. If you’re planning to use OctoPrint for 3D printing, also install the following packages: 
    sudo apt install libjpeg62-turbo-dev imagemagick ffmpeg libv4l-dev cmake libgphoto2-dev libopencv-dev libsdl1.2-dev libprotobuf-c-dev v4l-utils

GitHub

  1. Run ssh-keygen and upload the content of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to GitHub.
  2. Clone the raspberry-py repository with git clone git@github.com:MatthewGerber/raspberry-py.git.

PyCharm

  1. Download the community version here. Be sure to download the Linux ARM distribution, which is required for the Pi.
  2. Extract the archive and move the extracted directory to /opt/
  3. Add the PyCharm bin directory to your PATH in ~/.bashrc.
  4. Start PyCharm and open the raspberry-py repository.

I2C Interface

  1. Run raspi-config and enable the I2C interface.
  2. Run i2cdetect -y 1 to confirm. A blank I2C readout will be displayed if no I2C peripherals are connected.

Raspberry Pi Video Camera

  1. Modify boot config: sudo emacs /boot/firmware/config.txt and add start_x=1 and gpu_mem=256 at the end.
  2. Enable camera: Run raspi-config and enable the camera.
  3. Restart: sudo shutdown -r now
  4. Test: raspistill -o test.jpg

VNC

Run raspi-config and enable VNC under interface options. Then open an SSH tunnel to the Pi:

ssh -L 59000:localhost:5900 -l USER IP

In the above, USER is a local account on the Pi, and IP is the address of the Pi. Finally, open a VNC client on your remote machine (e.g., RealVNC) and open a connection to localhost:59000. Log in with the local account on the Pi.