Raspberry Pi
For our March meeting we turned to the Raspberry Pi. No one expressed having reached guru status so the meeting started from the beginning with what is needed to use a Pi and how to do the initial setup. Many of those attending had purchased a Pi in the preceding month, so everyone was on a pretty even footing.
I covered what you need in hardware and software tools to run your new Pi. My PowerPoint slides are available on the web page for this meeting.
In addition to my brief presentation, Fred Klingener talked about initial setup using NOOBS (New Out of Box Software) and one way a Raspberry Pi can be made a useful tool using just what comes with Raspian, the basic operating system. Raspian is a version of Linux ported to the Raspberry Pi. It comes with the Python programming environment, some sample programs in the form of games, and something called Mathematica. Fred demonstrated using Mathematica on a Raspberry Pi to perform basic and advanced math, display plots, and then tweet the results on Twitter! It was impressive and fun!
Resources:
Presentation on Raspberry Pi in PowerPoint
Presentation on Raspberry Pi in Acrobat PDF