I ordered my Raspberry Pi from Amazon. I got the Complete Kit which included the Model B Raspberry Pi, power supply, 8GB SD card with NOOBS pre-loaded, and a Wi-Fi dongle. I found an old Apple keyboard, Apple Pro Mouse and an even older Emerson 13" composite television to rig up my first 'maker' computer.
I watched the videos from Raspberry Pi Foundation and hoped for a successful first boot up. I was a little concerned that my 13" composite might not do the trick, since it only had coaxial input. I used an RCA to coaxial converter that I had in the garage. I tested it with a VCR to be sure that it worked.
The first boot up was not a success. Nothing but static on the screen. The RasPi's LED was lit, but it was not sending any signal to the TV. I retested all my other hardware and checked the cables, but still had no luck.
I decided to relocate to my living room to try it on my HDTV. SUCCESS! And it was beautiful to see it in all of it's HD glory! After NOOBS booted, I loaded Raspbian for the OS. It took about 15 minutes or so to load. Once everything loaded, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I poked around the OS to get a feel for how things worked. It was very similar to any graphical user interface. I hadn't planned on keeping my RasPi in the living room, so immediately got to work on trying to solve the problem of why my RasPi wouldn't send a signal to my old 13" TV.
Many reviewers on Amazon complained that their composite output was broken on delivery. The RasPi FAQ, however, explained that all their devices were factory tested. Considering they were made in the UK, I theorized that it was more of an NTSC/PAL issue, than a faulty jack. My theory was correct, but I didn't really have the skills to correct it.
I had to learn how to work with the config.txt file in the boot partition of the SD card. This required me to learn a little about Linux and how to comment out a line of code. I tried for several hours to modify the code but never got it to work. I gave up and went to the RasPi forum. I got a couple replies fairly quickly. I downloaded a newer version of NOOBS, erased the SD card, reloaded NOOBS, and rebooted while connected to the 13" TV and held Shift-4. SUCCESS! Raspbian had to be reloaded but I was happy to have finally have solved the problem after 24 hours.
I poked around for a bit while connected to the 13" TV. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. There is a reason why there are so many free composite televisions on craigslist. The image quality is dreadful. It is even worse to try and read computer text on a composite TV. However, one of my goals for my RasPi was to create a vintage gaming console that played NES, SNES, and Genesis games. I'd peeked a great tutorial for creating that project and concluded that 8-bit and 16-bit games would look fine on my old TV.
But before I could get to that, I wanted to connect my RasPi to the internet. My kit included a USB WiFi dongle and I read some tutorials about connecting to WiFi. Unfortunately, I have a hidden home network and my Linux skills weren't sharp enough to make the attempt. So, I decided to hardwire via ethernet to see if it worked. SUCCESS! Seeing the Google homepage load on the old 13" composite was magical. Kind of. 13 standard definition inches is not enough to view the most basic web page. I checked out a couple blogs and could hardly read a thing. There was some lag as pages loaded, but it wasn't unbearable. Connecting my RasPi to the internet proved a couple things. I either needed a HD monitor or start building the vintage gaming console.
I opted to download and install the Minecraft Pi Edition instead. Thankfully, there were multiple tutorials online for getting this done. Downloading was easy. However, I needed to launch my first LXTerminal session to decompress the file and load it. SUCCESS! Before long, I wasplaying Minecraft. Unfortunately, I know nothing about playing Minecraft. I figured out how to dig a hole and created a cave. I soon discovered that my 'vintage' Apple Pro mouse lacked a right-click button to allow me to build blocks. Normally, I would just use control-click but RasPi didn't respond. No worries. My cave was beautiful.
To more savvy Linux (and Minecraft) users, this is probably the most pathetic blog post ever written. Honestly, I am a little ashamed of my self for having become such a passive computer user. I used to connect all kinds of weird devices together with skill and ease. I was a web designer who could automate multiple tasks in Photoshop and creatively use HTML an Javascript to create interactive web pages. But that was 1990's and I have not maintained my skills. The past 96 hours have been a pleasure. I've been actively solving problems that lead to new ideas and creativity. And isn't that the point?
I can't wait to share this experience with my students next year.
