Monthly Archives: May 2018

Raspberry Pi 3 B+

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Not vintage, by any stretch of imagination, but I have been fascinated by the Raspberry Pi since they came out.

Last month, I ordered one, specifically I bought the newest Raspberry Pi, the 3 B+.

The package I ordered had the Pi, heat sink, the smoke case with the clear top, power supply and 8 GB micro SD card with NOOBS from Adafruit.

They shipped it right out and I got it in a few days.  Arriving in the afternoon, I spent about two hours trying to get the Pi board into the very pretty case.  It wasn’t going to go in more than about three quarters of the way and it just would not snap in.  I set the case aside and tried to run it with out the case.  I got it all set up with a TV and plugged in the power for a very pretty rainbow screen with a lighting bolt off to the side.

A quick look on the internet shows that this might mean I need a newer OS than came on the SD card.

I went out and got another micro SD card and following the instructions on the Raspberry Pi downloads page (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/) downloaded the latest NOOBS image and put it on the new SD card.  This one booted right up and worked fine.

Knowing that everything was working as it should I went on further at the Raspberry Pi website.  Apparently others have had the same problem and there was a video that showed exactly what my problem was.  When you put the card in the case you put the long edge with the HDMI port in first and tip the card down away from yourself until it snaps into place.  The problem I had was the micro usb port has a very tight opening and you have to be perfectly square or it won’t go together.  After watching the video I tried again and it went right in.

All in all, its a nice little computer.  I’ve had some older laptops with less power.

 

 

 

RC2018/04 – April 30

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The month has run out.  My project is nowhere near done.  It is in fact barely started.

I have been working on initializing the files.  Seems like every time I made a step forward, I trip over something.  I’ve been working with three manuals in PDF format and a large paperbound book.

It took me days to figure out why I was getting a Protection Violation.  It turns out I was over thinking opening the file and added an unnecessary mode.

Now I’m dealing with a bloated file.  It should be a block in length and yet it exploded up to sixteen blocks.  The record size of the file should mean I could get 16 records in a block.

While RC2018/04 is over, my project is not done, but I plan to keep plugging away on it!