Anyone familiar with Raspberry Pi?

[Claudiusx]

... Because I'm not.

But since I spent the last 4 hours (I need a better hobby) trying to find an affordable spectrometer, and everything viable I found was $800-2000 for some possibly sketchy who-knows-if-it-works paper weight, I eventually found this:

I want to build this, but I have no familiarity at all with Raspberry PI.

A spectrometer is needed for some nerdy stuff I have planned.

-Brandon

 

[xp29]

I wish i could help, but no experience here.

 

[beardie]

What you wanna know? I’ve tinkered with them on and off for about a decade. I probably own some 10-12 of them, even some I never used (rPi Zeros were cool and cheap but not very functional).

Most projects will either give you instructions for downloading and installing/configuring packages (assuming a base operating system image is used to start), or even give you a full image that you need to flash to a micro SD card.

My most used rPi is my Time Machine server (to back up the 3 Macs in my home).

Also, depending on your use-case… consider mounting a hard drive after it boots off the SD card, and overlaying the SD card mount with the HDD. The reason being that SD cards fail way too easily. I’ve had a lot of headache when I used rPis for numerous services at home. So much so I moved most of that into VMs running on a Mac Mini.

 

[Claudiusx]

What you wanna know?

I'm more of a hardware guy than a software guy.

I can build that device 100%. What I don't understand is how I am going to actually run the device. What all is involved in hooking this device up to my computer so I can actually see the spectra graphs?

I've never used Raspberry Pi so I am not familiar with it at all, how to run it, how to set it up, what's required.

Here is the github link to it:

GitHub - leswright1977/PySpectrometer2: The Second Incarnation of the Spectrometer project!

The Second Incarnation of the Spectrometer project! - GitHub - leswright1977/PySpectrometer2: The Second Incarnation of the Spectrometer project!

github.com

Maybe anyone familiar with it can give me an idea of what I need to do to get it to work, if I were to build the device?

I figure since I've never done anything with Raspberry Pi that I'd need other items too to interface between the device and my computer?

-Brandon

 

[beardie]

Well, Raspberry Pis are pretty simple. It’s just a computer with the hardware interfaces on it. There are libraries used to access the hardware, send signals, etc. it looks like this project is largely taking the camera connector and extending it to a spectroscope, right?

So, I suspect the first step is getting a basic Pi running… again, Pis are just computers. So first thing is to get the image to boot an operating system. I see the project said this:

Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye

You want to get an image for that. If you Google how to create raspberry pi sd card, I’m sure you can find the tools. I forget what I use on my Mac. But it is just a simple SD card writer that will take an image file and write it to the card. The OS image you can get from the official raspberry pi site.

Once you burn the image on the card, you insert it into the pi. You’ll want a monitor, and keyboard. It boots like any Linux computer.

Once booted, login (usually as the user account named “pi”.

Then you will need to install some simple tools for git if not on by default, using apt-get command (package installer for Ubuntu Linux based OS’s). Then he has commands to sync his GitHub repo scripts. Then you connect hardware. Make sure the libraries he mentions are installed and I’m guessing just run the python scripts he has. I’m not sure how that all works. But it looks just like install stuff, run stuff.

 

[beardie]

I still haven’t looked in depth, but it looks like the Python script is creating the full GUI interface. So you will probably want a mouse to hook up as well. My guess is you run it by opening a terminal session, and that it will display to the X-windows (Linux GUI subsystem) desktop.