At last I have finally got around to getting the Raspberry Pi working!
I bought this little goody over a year ago and since then have got some of the bits and pieces needed to make it work. First, the Operating System which I found easier to buy a 8Gb SD card with the NOOBS already installed...about £7. Also needed a suitable PSU...£4 and a nice little case £2.95 all from Amazon. A great source for bits for the RPi.
Next I needed a HDMI to VGA adaptor so that I can connect to an old VGA monitor which sits around doing nothing. The RPi only has an HDMI socket. Now these adaptors are notorious for not working and can also be quite expensive, but searching on Amazon I found one with loads of good reviews and how to make it work on the RPi. At a cost of only £9, I decided to risk it and order one.
If you look in the customer reviews of the product it tells you how to edit the boot/config.txt and change the settings to make it work correctly using the built in text editor called 'Nano' on the RPi.
How to do it:
This method is most useful if you can see the display of the Raspberry Pi and you wish to make minor adjustments.
- Reboot the Raspberry Pi and enter your username and password.
- To edit the configuration file, enter the command
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
- Type in the necessary configuration parameters
Press Control-x
Press y
Press [enter]
- After exiting the editor, restart using the command
sudo reboot
Here are the changes that I made:
edited /boot/config.txt initially to uncomment the hdmi_safe=1 line
booted
the pi - (low-res vga mode)
in terminal
sudo nano
/boot/config.txt
commented out the hdmi_safe line
uncommented/edited to
give the following
settings: (uncomment means remove the # at the beginning of the line)
hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=16
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
ctrl
+ o to save
ctrl + x to exit
sudo reboot
I think the important setting for me
was:
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
This forces video out from your R-Pi,
whether it detects the HDMI monitor or not (the R-pi doesn't send out video
unless it detects a monitor, as default, but the monitor wasn't switching on
unless it detected input
Now it works a treat on my old monitor!
Here is the adaptor that I used....
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapter-Laptop-Power-Free-Raspberry-support/dp/B0088K7QUQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
