Yesterday we introduced what a Raspberry Pi is, and today we’ve brought it home. How do we play with it? I’ll guide you step by step. Wait, just having a Raspberry Pi is not enough; you also need a micro SD card, at least 16GB, as small capacity ones are hard to find these days. Once you have the memory card, you can burn a system onto it (we’re talking about Raspbian here), and the Raspberry Pi will boot up. It’s quite simple. How do you do it? Keep reading.

When your Raspberry Pi arrives, it should look like this:

Take out the main board, insert the memory card, and can you turn it on? Wait, you haven’t burned the system onto the card yet, so don’t rush, let’s take it step by step.

First, connect the memory card to your computer using a card reader. What? You don’t have a card reader? Buy one. After connecting to the computer and being recognized, open the burning software (the software will be provided at the end of the article), find the system image you downloaded, and write it to the card.

Before burning the system, first format the memory card. Here we use Panasonic_SDFormatter to format the memory card:

Panasonic_SDFormatter

After inserting the memory card, it will automatically recognize the drive letter of the memory card. If you have multiple memory cards or other removable devices plugged in, be careful not to select the wrong one.

Next, click on “Option Settings” and select “Erase Format”:

Alright, after hitting format, wait a few seconds for it to finish. It will prompt you to unplug the card and plug it back in again, but I didn’t unplug it and didn’t see any issues.

Next, we need to burn the system onto the memory card. Here I will demonstrate the usage of two burning software:

1. USB Image Tool

USB Image Tool

Similar to the formatting software, after inserting the memory card, it will automatically select its drive letter. You just need to click here and select your system image.

Once you have selected the system image, just write it, and quietly wait for the progress bar to finish. It might take a while depending on your memory card’s write speed, so be patient.

2. Win32DiskImager

Win32DiskImager

This software interface looks like this. The memory card icon on my computer looks a bit strange and the software doesn’t recognize it, but that’s okay, it doesn’t affect our use.

First, we need to select that card by clicking on the icon, then click Restore below like this:

Then select the system image, confirm it, and wait for the progress bar in the lower left corner to finish.

One important thing to note when using these two software is that: your system image storage path must not contain Chinese characters, otherwise it will report an error and you won’t be able to write it in.

Alright, now that we’ve finished writing the image, insert it into the Raspberry Pi’s card slot, connect the power, monitor, and keyboard/mouse, and you can start using it. You can fully enjoy your Raspberry Pi (welcome to the club). Get started!

But I believe many friends haven’t set up a monitor for it. In the next article, we will discuss what to do without a monitor. See you next time!