Raspberry Pi - can anyone help please??

[Tryingtocatchup]

Hello, we have bought a raspberry pi for our 11 DS as a surprise but DH and me are pretty useless when it comes to gadgets. Can anyone please advise what we should get / do in advance so that it can be used on Christmas day without too much stress / (divorce) ?

We have bought the book adventures in raspberry pi and a gadget set that goes with it.

Plus, we have an old monitor, keyboard and have bought a starter kit comprising raspberry pi B plus, wifi dongle, 8 GB SD card, case, power supply and HDMI cable.

Apparently the SD card has NOOBS loaded on to it already - and this is where we are in the dark and really can't understand any of it (no idea what NOOBS is!)

Should we download anything else or do anything to it in advance to make for a calmer Christmas?

And how do you get to do 'scratch' on it?

Someone also mentioned on one of these threads that it is easy to blow it up if you attach things and 'so it's best to get something to do opto-isolisation' ? Any suggestions?

As you can tell we are complete novices so would be really really grateful for any advice.

The fun is spending hours working things out,DS set up Scratch himself by trial and error.Think you have everything covered,if all else fails he could make a Lego cover for it Xmas day.

Hi!

NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Setup) is a utility to get the operating system installed onto the SD Card. You're best to choose Raspbian at this point.

Default username is pi and password is raspberry

At the cli (Command Line) you can type startx to load the GUI (Graphical User Interface) that's the bit that has all the menus etc...

You might want to open up a terminal and update the system, you can do: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade answer Y to the question and your system will get updated to latest version.

You may also need to do some tweaking to the display settings to suit your display, come back here if you do.

Raspbian already includes scratch, you'll find it on the desktop.

I wouldn't worry about opto-isolation at the moment, once you start hooking things up to the GPIO (General Purpose Input / Output) then I'd have a think about it.

Once you've messed around with Scratch for a bit, move on to Python it has a good GPIO library, you can easily hook up some LEDs to the GPIO and get them to flash etc...

Hope that helps, drop a message here if you've any problems.

Cheers,

Dave.

I second the Lego case. Ours currently has a Lego case. :)

Thank you so much for your help everyone. And Dave in particular that's fantastic detail you've given me thanks - I will be reading this step by step on Christmas day and will revert if we get stuck!

I'm quite excited about this as it's going to be a complete surprise to DS! Hopefully it will divert him from Minecraft for a bit!