RaspberryPi Setup

Install Heatsink

I'm not planning to overclock my RPi. This unit will be installed in a box outside and I want it to be as much stable as possible. Without overclocking your RPi you do not really need any kind of heatsinks on your cpu, but since it's quite cheap to find little "ram memory" heatsinks I did install them, maybe this will make things even more stable during summer time.

I did use small copper heatsinks that I already had around, they are "ENZOTECH BMR-C1" model.

First Boot

After getting your RPi board you have to prepare your SD card for the first boot.
There are a lot of very good tutorials on how to do it, and I've found this one very useful and detailed, so why duplicating the effort?
Here is the link: http://hertaville.com/2012/09/27/raspbian-raspberry-pi/
And here is a pdf: RPi_Installing-Raspbian-On-The-Raspberry-Pi-Using-SSH-Hertaville.pdf

Tweaks to the default installation

The very first thing I do after the initial configuration is enabling my RPi for ssh and wifi connection.
For wifi I did use with success two dongles already:

  1. Tp-Link TL-WN723N 150 Mbps (based on REALTEK RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN)
  2. Tp-Link TL-WN823N 300 Mbps (based on REALTEK RTL8192CU 802.11n WLAN)

I guess as long as your adapter is well supported by linux default kernel (REALTEK seems to be), you should not have wifi dongle issues...

For SSH, WiFi and remote access I've found this tutorial excellent, it does show you how to setup your network so that you can search for "known hotspots" and eventually fall back on a "safe mode" where the RPi itself become an Access Point, allowing you to always connect to your board via ssh.

Here is the link: raspberry-pi-tutorial-connect-to-wifi-or-create-an-encrypted-dhcp-enabled-ad-hoc-network-as-fallback
And here is a pdf: RPi_Connect-To-WiFi-Or-Create-An-Encrypted-DHCP-Enabled-Ad-hoc-Network-As-Fallback-Lasse-Christiansen.pdf

Last thing to not forget is NTP, you want your clock to be always in sync! easy to install:


	#> sudo apt-get install ntpdate

Now your basic Raspbian is set on your RaspberryPi unit.

Little tools that I always find useful on my RPi: htop, octave, perl/CPAN