Raspberry Pi Setup

Operating System

Using the SD card purchased as part of the Bill of Materials, you will need to install Raspbian Lite Linux distribution onto your Raspberry Pi using the official instructions. Raspbian Lite is recommended because it is lightweight, and PIoT was designed to work on it. Other distributions are not tested and are not recommended.

Configure Network

Insert the WiFi dongle purchased as part of the Bill of Materials, and power on the Raspberry Pi. You will need your WiFi network’s SSID and WPA key. Generate the configuration for the WPA supplicant with wpa_passphrase SSID passphrase. Make sure to replace SSID with your WiFi network’s SSID and passphrase with your WiFi network’s password.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ wpa_passphrase "SSID" "password"
network={
    ssid="SSID"
    #psk="password"
    psk=2f6a0beddf2f0588ee426b0c3a0e3d9a523bb07a05cb857f85d826da80fa75c4
}

Tip

Make sure your network information is correct, or the Raspberry Pi’s network will fail to connect when it is rebooted.

Copy the entire output (network section) from the wpa_passphrase command and append it to the end of /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
        ssid="SSID"
        #psk="password"
        psk=2f6a0beddf2f0588ee426b0c3a0e3d9a523bb07a05cb857f85d826da80fa75c4
}

Reboot the Raspberry Pi with sudo reboot. The Raspberry Pi should be connected to your WiFi network when it reboots.

Tip

The Raspberry Pi’s network connections will not initialize if either the WiFi or ethernet connection cannot successfully connect. If you want to use one network connection, do not use the other. For example, if you want to use the WiFi, do not connect the Ethernet connection.

Expand the SD Card

When the Raspbian image is copied to the SD card, the operating system partition will not take up the entire SD card. The SD card should be expanded.

Enter the Raspberry Pi configuration tool.

sudo raspi-config --expand-rootfs

Reboot the Raspberry Pi with sudo reboot. The Raspberry Pi’s partition should now use the entire SD card.