Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By : Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By: Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto

Overview of this book

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, a new series of the popular compact computer is available for you to build cheap, exciting projects and learn about programming. In this book, we explore Raspberry Pi 2’s hardware through a number of projects in a variety of programming languages. We will start by exploring the various hardware components in detail, which will provide a base for the programming projects and guide you through setting up the tools for Assembler, C/C++, and Python. We will then learn how to write multi-threaded applications and Raspberry Pi 2’s multi-core processor. Moving on, you’ll get hands on by expanding the storage options of the Raspberry Pi beyond the SD card and interacting with the graphics hardware. Furthermore, you will be introduced to the basics of sound programming while expanding upon your knowledge of Python to build a web server. Finally, you will learn to interact with the third-party microcontrollers. From writing your first Assembly Language application to programming graphics, this title guides you through the essentials.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up the external HDD


Next we will explore how we can use an external HDD attached to one of the USB ports to store our programs and operating system. This will involve modifying the boot settings as well as setting up the external hardware.

First of all, we need to know what the disk name of our external hard drive is so we can copy the operating system to it and configure the Raspberry Pi to use it.

The first step is to plug the external hard drive into one of the free USB drives. Once you have done this, you can proceed with the next steps.

Getting the disk name

Grabbing the disk name for the device once it is connected is fairly simple; you'll need this and the microSD card name as we move through this chapter.

Start by loading up the command line if you don't have it open already. There is a utility called df, which tells us the amount of space left on the file system of the mounted disk. In addition, it lists the names of the disks attached to the Raspberry Pi 2.

You can run the command...