Chemistrify your Raspberry Pi Part II

In Part I, we got this very lean mean machine up and running. Now we want to take a look at what's going on in its tiny tiny silicon brain. If you have a monitor/TV and USB keyboard and mouse it's easy - just plug them in. In my case I don't so...

...I'm going to log in remotely using my laptop over the network. The good news is that there's an ssh server running by default on the RPi. The username is pi and password is raspberry. All we need is the RPi's IP address.

Connect the RPi to your router using an ethernet cable. If both are turned on, the router will assign the RPi an IP address. You can find out the value by logging into your router and looking at the details (or you can just guess the IP address by changing the number at the end of your laptop's IP address). Once you have the IP address, you can log in with Putty or Cygwin's ssh (remember, username pi).

The first time you log in, it asks you to run 'sudo raspi-config'. I did so, to set the timezone, expand the root filesystem (otherwise it doesn't use the whole SD card), and reduce the video memory to 32MB from 64MB (under "Memory split"). When you hit Finish it reboots, killing ssh, so you have to wait a minute before logging back in.

While some believe that the Unix command line is the perfect user interface, let's see what the Raspbian GUI looks like. To do so, we are going to use VNC (Virtual Network Computing), and specifically a piece of software called TightVNC. We will set up a server on the RPi, and a viewer on the laptop.

On the RPi:

$ sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
$ tightvncserver :1

If you set a password, make a note of it.

On the Windows laptop, install TightVNC. Please note that when you run the installer, you should untick the box that sets TightVNC running as a Windows service. This would be a BAD idea, as it would mean that your desktop is being broadcast over the network.

Now run "TightVNC Viewer" and connect to the RPi by entering the IP address of the RPi followed by ":5901", e.g. 128.128.0.1:5901. If you set a password, you will need to enter it. Finally, you should see something like this:

I still haven't done any chemistry but I guess that's all in Part III...

Notes: From time to time the router changes the IP address it allocates. If you want to assign a fixed IP address to the RPi, see the information here (untested). If you want the RPi to automatically start a TightVNC server on booting, see the information in the same article.