Faculty of Electronics Telecommunication and EAOS

Information Technology

Department of Applied Electronics and Embedded Architectures &

Intelligent Systems Operating Systems

1. Laboratory
Safety, precautions with Raspberry Pi development system and Raspbian install

2.1. Safety and precautions

RPi boards are complex and delicate devices that are very easily damaged if you do not show
due care. If you are moving up from boards like the Arduino to the RPi platform, you have to be
especially careful when connecting circuits that you built for that platform to the RPi. Unlike the
Arduino Uno (or other development boards), the microprocessor on the RPi cannot be replaced. If you
damage the microprocessor (SoC), you will have to buy a new board!
Here are some things that you should never do:

 Do not shut the RPi down by pulling out the USB power supply! You should shut down the
board correctly using a software shutdown procedure.
 Do not place a powered RPi on metal surfaces (e.g., aluminum-fi nish computers) or on worktops
with stray/cut-off wire segments, resistors, etc. If you short the pins underneath the GPIO header,
you can easily destroy your board. You can buy a cases such as those presented in Figure 1.1.
Alternatively, you can attach small self-adhesive rubber feet to the bottom of the RPi.
 Do not connect circuits that source/sink other than very low currents from/to the GPIO header.
The maximum current that you can source or sink from many of these header pins is
approximately 2 mA to 3 mA. The power rail and ground pins can source and sink larger currents.
For comparison, some Arduino models allow currents of 40 mA on each input/output.

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Figure 1.1. Cases for Raspberry Pi B+ model

 The GPIO pins are 3.3 V tolerant. Do not connect a circuit that is powered at 5 V; otherwise, you
will destroy the board.
 Do not connect circuits that apply power to the GPIO header while the RPi is not powered on.
Make sure that all self-powered interfacing circuits are gated by the 3.3 V supply line or using
optocouplers.
 Carefully check the pin numbers that you are using. Double check the connections, if they are
properly made, before powering on. There are 40 pins on the GPIO header, and it is very easy to
plug into header connector 21 instead of 19. The T-Cobbler board (presented in Figure 1.2(a) or
the Cobbler Kit are very useful for interconnecting the RPi to a breadboard, and it is highly
recommended for prototyping work. Most of the pins in the header go directly to the
Broadcom chip. It is important to carefully design the components you attach to them as
there is a risk you will permanently damage your Pi.

(a) (b)

Figure 1.2. (a) T-Cobbler Kit and (b) Cobbler Kit

 The header provides 5V on Pin 2 and 3.3V on Pin 1. The 3.3V supply is limited to 50mA. The 5V
supply draws current directly from your micro USB supply so can use whatever is left over after

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the board has taken its share. A 1A power supply could supply up to 300mA once the board has
drawn 700mA.

2.2. Setting up your Raspberry Pi operating system

The Raspberry Pi development board uses by default the Raspbian operating system (OS) –
a Debian-based Linux distribution. But it is able to uses, as well as, third-party OS like: Ubuntu,
Windows 10 IoT Core or RISC OS.
In this laboratory we will work mainly with Raspbian OS. If you do not have a SD with
Raspbian OS, you can easily install it by yourself.
The use of the NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Software) software package is the easiest way
to install Raspbian OS on your SD card. The NOOBS is an easy way operating system installer. It
contains Raspbian and LibreELEC OS. But, it also provides a selection of other OS which are
downloaded from the internet and installed when the user require this.
The steps required to be performed in order to install Raspbian OS:
1. First, download NOOBS. For this, please visit the Raspberry Pi download page:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Figure 1.3. NOOBS download page

There you should see a box linking to the NOOBS files, see Figure 1.3. Click on the box
with NOOBS text on it.
On the new page, download the zip archive with the files – please choose the NOOBS
version, not the NOOBS Lite version.

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2. Download the SD Formatter application from the SD Association’s website:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/index.html
and follows the steps required to install this application.
3. Insert your SD card into the computer or laptop’s SD card reader. Using the SD Formatter
all files from the SD card will be overwritten and it will be lost during the formatting
process – so, if it is necessary backup first the files from SD card.

Figure 1.4. SD Formatter program

4. In SD Formatter, select your SD card, and now format the card by pushing the Format
button.
5. Next, you will need to extract the files from the NOOBS zip archive copy them to the card.
Once the files have all been copied to the SD card, you can eject the SD card.
6. Insert the SD card you’ve set up with NOOBS into the microSD card slot on of your
Raspberry Pi development board.
7. Now, boot from SD card and install the Raspbian OS.
8. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a power switch: as soon as you connect it to a power outlet,
it will turn on.
9. Now, wait for a while and select the Raspbian Full – the first option and push the Install
buton.

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