Before we begin, fun fact: Middleman doesn’t like generating articles with exclamation points in the title. I’m guessing it has a problem stripping them out when generating the filename. Maybe this is a good opportunity for a pull request!
I’m following Gordon Turner’s Raspberry Pi guide to start step one of putting an information radiator in my home.
Hardware
I’m using an old monitor and an old Raspberry Pi 1. 8 GB memory card from who knows when. Nothing fancy here; why invest in hardware when I haven’t written any software yet?
Turning It On
I guess there’s one piece of hardware I invested in that was a nice-to-have — a Wemo Mini Smart Plug. Right now I have it hooked up to an IFTTT recipe that lets me press a button on my iPad to toggle the Pi on and off. Eventually I’ll have it hooked up to Alexa or put on a schedule so I can see it in the morning and otherwise have the whole thing turned off.
Setting Up the Pi
I followed the Raspberry Pi setup steps to get Raspbian Stretch flashed onto the memory card. (Etcher Pro looks _so_ cool btw) Next was to follow the directions as they were written out! I especially liked the instructions to SSH into the Pi, since that lets me copypasta the scripts easily from my MacBook Pro. After following those instructions, everything worked out!
Next Steps
Next I’ll want to design a website — it’ll have to be pretty lightweight so the Pi can easily render it. I think that’ll be a fun challenge! I also want to get my domains in order: I’ve been having trouble with GitHub Pages and custom domains, so I’ll probably bite the bullet and host on AWS or something. We’ll see what kind of architecture I need.
That’s it for now! This is the first day of a week long “sabbatical” for me. I’m using the time to get caught up on grad work, relax from burnout, and innovate. So far so good!