Yee Haw!

Our next set of classes start this weekend. We are going to be using the newest version of Raspbian out nicknamed “Jessie” after the yodeling cowgirl from Toy Story. There are quite a few interesting features that we are itching to try such as the new version of Scratch which has a new GPIO server built right in!

Looking forward to playing with the new Java environments, Blue J & Greenfoot, the Libre Office Suite and the new screen capture feature to be able to share our work on the blog.

How do I get Raspbian?

download here.

How do I install Raspbian on my SD card? (mac)

It’s best to start with a clean image. Once the image file has been downloaded, plug in your SD card and open up Terminal

Identify the partition of your SD card

diskutil list

in this example my partition is on /dev/disk2

Unmount your SD card

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Format your SD card (the SD card needs to be formatted in FAT32)

sudo newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/disk2

start the copy (my disk image was named 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img and is in the Desktop folder

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=5m

The process should take about 10 minutes, make sure you eject SD card properly before removing from your Mac.

Insert card into your Raspberry Pi and boot as normal.

Let me know how it worked for you.

Some useful items USB micro SD card reader, Micro SD card adapter and of course the micro SD card.