![\"PiAssembled-500Wide.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/PiAssembled_500Wide.jpg\")
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My longtime friend and collaborator Jim Strickland has had a Raspberry Pi<\/a> board almost since the beginning, and he startled me by handing me one as a Christmas present. I was aware of it but hadn’t researched it deeply. Here’s a good place to start if you’re new to the concept<\/a>.<\/p>\n Basically, it’s an ARM-6 board with HDMI and composite video output, two USB ports, and a standard RJ45 Ethernet connector. For disk it uses an SDHC card. There’s an I\/O header for connecting to physical gadgets like relays and lights and things. There’s more than one OS available for it, but most people use the adaptation of Debian Wheezy<\/a> called Raspbian<\/a>.<\/p>\n I don’t like having circuit boards flopping around in mid-air, so I drilled and tapped two 4-40 holes in a husky 3\/16″ aluminum plate and mounted the Pi on a pair of 3\/8″ nylon standoffs.<\/p>\n Putting it together was a snap. I downloaded the Raspbian image file, wrote it out to a spare 8 GB SDHC card I had in the drawer with Image Writer for Windows<\/a>, plugged the card into the card slot on the board, hooked up the cables, and turned it on.<\/p>\n Bootup isn’t snappy, and the first time in you have to set a few things like time zone, but in a couple of minutes I had Linux on my big-screen LED TV. The small black item connected to the USB port block in the photo above is the Bluetooth dongle for a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. This leaves me a port free for something else. Ethernet came to the device through a pair of Linksys Powerline bridges, which I’ve described here before<\/a>.<\/p>\n I now have what Michael Abrash would call “Linux on my bedroom wall.”<\/p>\n