What I Learned From Tinkering With Raspberry Pi for Five Years
Today is Pi Day, and there is no better way to celebrate the beloved math constant than to take a look at everyone’s beloved $ 35 computer, the Raspberry Pi. Since launching the Raspberry Pi, I’ve written an absurd number of tutorials, blogs, and an outdated book on the variety of projects you can do with it. I’ve learned a lot during this time.
Troubleshooting is a life skill you need to practice
The joy I get from solving some stupid problem is one of the main things that drew me to the Raspberry Pi from the very beginning. Luckily, Raspberry Pi projects have gotten easier over the years. Whereas previously creating an SD card was a complex process , it is now largely automatic. However, the Raspberry Pi is nowhere near as user-friendly as a PC or Mac. This is a feature, not a bug. The Raspberry Pi is built to make you learn how to troubleshoot, and it’s still one of my favorite things about it.
Before hobbyists grabbed hold of the Raspberry Pi, it was a computer for teaching programming, aimed primarily at children. The appeal has expanded since then, but the project still can’t “just work” out of the box. You will have to tweak something, dig around the command line, or spend hours on a little-known internet forum to find solutions to problems that seem to be just yours. You will bang your head against the wall, yell a little, and throw your Raspberry Pi at least once for every project you try.
With every project completed, with every bug fixed, and every typo you fix, there is a little glow inside your stomach that is worth all the effort. Troubleshooting is a way to process the world as a whole, but if you don’t test these “if-then” skills over and over, you will lose them.
Linux is a pain, but it’s worth learning how to use it
Before the Raspberry Pi, my experience with Linux included one failed attempt to set up a music server. Now, while I’m still not interested in using it on a day to day basis, overall I’m happy with it. However, it is still a pain to use.
When I first started working on the Raspberry Pi, my biggest obstacle, besides just using the command line, was trying to figure out when and when not to use the sudo . If I’ve learned anything in my formative years on Windows PCs and more recently on Macs, it’s that messing around with files, folders, and system-level permission settings is a surefire way to wipe out your computer. I had to interrupt this thought process because many Raspberry Pi projects require superuser access. The good news is that breaking the Raspberry Pi itself is nearly impossible, although I’ve used more than a few SD cards.
I’m still amazed at how much you can do with Linux. You can subjugate him to your will and make him do whatever you want. This includes turning your Raspberry Pi into a weird tiny jukebox , a networked ad blocker, or a portable jailbreak device . This also means that you can often reproduce many commercial products. Amazon Echo is the most prominent example here, but security cameras , weather displays, and DIY security systems work too. Heck, we’ve even seen new products being created like the science fiction-inspired smart mirror . You will need to know at least a little about Linux, Python, or both to do the most complex Raspberry Pi projects. Learning the quirks of Linux may seem like a pointless endeavor in the modern computer age, but I promise you it’s worth it in the end.
For me, Linux extensibility has always been useless in terms of day to day drivers, but useful in the case of the Raspberry Pi. Linux does it so that I can turn my dumbest ideas from an idiotic plan into a semi-working project, like an animated GIF photo frame . This goofy photo frame is still my favorite Pi project, whatever the cost.
The Raspberry Pi is a great game console, but nostalgic when it doesn’t work
While we all love a home automation system , voice-controlled home computers, or smart laptop designs, the most popular reason to buy a Raspberry Pi is to turn it into a retro gaming console .
I first tried building a Pi emulation machine in May 2013 . Since most of my Pi projects were running at the time, my first attempt failed after about 13 hours of waiting until a bunch of emulator tools could be loaded that didn’t work and then broke my SD card.
Once that failed, I dug deeper until I found the Super Nintendo Pi , which is associated with the new RetroPie project. It was still in the early stages of development at the time . I built on these two Lifehacker instruction sets the first version of our Raspberry Pi video game guide . RetroPie was the simplest tool I found to create an emulation machine with a Raspberry Pi, but even that required manually editing a text file if you wanted to use a controller. The process is now so simple that it takes less than five minutes to get the whole thing up and running.
RetroPie’s simplicity, combined with the open source and cheap nature of the Raspberry Pi, means people have done cool things with both, such as building handheld devices , controller-filled consoles , and of course full-sized arcade cabinets .
Game emulation has been around long before the Raspberry Pi. If you’re in your early 30s, you’re almost guaranteed to download some SNES emulator and illegal copy of Super Mario World for a nostalgic gaming session at some point in your life. For computer geeks of all ages, trying to emulate at least once is akin to the ritual of building your own computer. That said, while emulation has always been available on PCs and Macs, things have somehow gotten better with the Pi.
There are probably obvious logistical reasons for this. The Raspberry Pi costs $ 35, and even with a good controller and everything else you need, you can build your own game console for under $ 80. You can even buy a kit for a small tabletop cabinet for $ 330. However, I don’t think low cost is the only thing that attracts. It’s one thing to feel nostalgic for the old games, and it’s another to feel nostalgic for the experience of playing those games. The Raspberry Pi not only emulates the games themselves, but the clumsy setup process is more in line with my memories of setting up a game console in the 80s and 90s. According to the child Thorin, it takes thousands of cables to connect a console to a TV. Even after the consoles were set up, they didn’t always work. Flushing the cartridges may not have worked , but this was the first troubleshooting clue most of us have learned. Even after leaving the era of cartridges, I remember that I had to turn my PlayStation upside down so that it could read discs . Every iteration of the console seemed to come up with a ridiculous solution to a common problem. This persists to this day , but not the way it was before.
Everything about old consoles seems cumbersome and strange to children’s brains, and while the Raspberry Pi doesn’t recreate any of these troubleshooting moments, it does a good job of creating its own. Every time RetroPie works, it still seems like a small triumph. This triumph, when you download the game, has the same strong feeling as flipping a PlayStation to load Final Fantasy VII.