Raspberry Pi 3 in easy steps

Book excerpt: The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive programmable credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It can be used for many of the things that your PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and playing games, but its real purpose is to inspire children (and adults) to learn how to program. Over five million Raspberry Pis have been sold worldwide, so far! Raspberry Pi 3 in easy steps starts with the basic components you’ll need, setting up the system and logging into the console. Then, in easy steps, it introduces you to the Raspbian operating system that is optimized for the Raspberry Pi. You'll learn how to customize the look and feel of your system, how to navigate the file system, and how to use the powerful system ‘shell’ to make things happen for you. The new GPIO interface is fully described, and the new NOOBS installer is also described for setup. Raspberry Pi 3 in easy steps enables complete beginners to create their very own computer programs with the Scratch visual programming environment. It also instructs programming in the high-level (human-readable) Python programming language, which is processed by the Python ‘interpreter’ to produce results fast. Examples demonstrate how to use the included Python ‘pygame’ module, to make your own games, and how to use the included 'Tkinter’ module to create graphical windowed apps. Raspberry Pi 3 in easy steps also illustrates how to control electrical input and output on the Raspberry Pi header from Python scripts, including lighting a lamp, adding more buttons and controlling projects. With the knowledge gained from this book the reader can confidently advance to any future electronic Raspberry Pi project or other explore other programming environments. Covers the latest versions of Python.