Out of the box, the thing looked... exposed. Vulnerable. As seen in the picture above, I rested it on the box it came with. Like with my computer parts used to build my PC, I had a really big dose of paranoia with the thought that the Pi would be fried with ESD.
I already had a Class-10 microSD from Samsung, but I was unaware that the Pi didn't come with a power cable or adapter. After a bit of searching, I found an adapter that matched the requirements of the Pi - a 5v 2A Samsung adapter for the Samsung Tab.
No, not the 10.1, the actual Samsung Galaxy Tab - the 7 year old one. Back to the time Samsung used 30-pin connectors like Apple.
Ancient.
With everything set up on the hardware side, I looked to begin my software installation. Unfortunately, my motherboard didn't come with a SD reader, and neither did my computer case, so I had to use a old SD reader gifted to me on my birthday.
The Spider-Man graphic on the front sums up why I didn't use it before.
Following the installation guide, I installed the SD Formatter tool, formatted the microSD with Format Size Adjustment on, copied NOOBS to the microSD, installed the microSD, then powered it on, and was then overjoyed to recieve:
Then:
My joy was short-lived though, as I was greeted with an error while creating the partition.
Raspbian: Failed to mount filesystem.
The first time I received the error, I quickly looked it up. Solutions ranged from 'did you enable Format Size Adjustment' to 'maybe the microSD is defective'. I ran a quick software test to ensure the latter was untrue. Reaching the conclusion that I must have messed up somewhere, I reformatted the whole thing and copied NOOBS again.
The same thing happened.
Again.
I then tried reformatting it with the SD Formatter then formatting it again with some third party software recommended for large SD cards.
The same thing happened.
Again.
And then I came across a forum post that had this to say:
Don't use NOOBS. Install the Raspbian image directly from the RPi website using the 'Win32DiskImager' tool.
And I did.
And it was fine. Really. It started up into the GUI after doing some initial setup. After setting up the VNC service and SSH, I tested it out... and it worked!
VNC:
SSH:
An advantage of SSH is it works when the X-Server is disabled. VNC just kinda freezes up. Oh, and did I mention the command line looks more badass?
Now that I got this bad boy working, it's time to do some installation.
Next up: AlexaPi!