Part 1: The Hardware Boot Setup

For this air quality monitoring project, we are going to use a low cost but accurate enough sensors to monitor air quality. Hence, Raspberry Pi is chosen as our development platform.

What is Raspberry Pi ?
It is a low costs SBC (Single Board Computer) that is designed in UK and made in UK (in mid 2013 onwards).There are 2 types of Raspberry Pi model : Model A and Model B.

They are almost same a PC but their specs is only a bit off.

The differences are stated below.

Model	A	B
RAM	256MB	512MB
USB	1X	2X
Ethernet (LAN)	No	Yes

Here is how the Raspberry Pi (Model B) will looked like (If you bought it from Element14)
Although Model A may suffice but Model B is preferable as we might need to use the network (Internet) to update the readings in future road maps of this project.

Here is short over view for each functions of the ports -
(General Purposes Input Output) GPIO - It functions to receive inputs from sensors and also as well as give commands to the stepper motor to perform turning

RCA video jack - This video jack is used on older type of CRT TV but it is not advisable to use this as the quality pictures displayed on screen is not suitable for debugging (For example the '6' is too similar to 'b')

3.5mm audio jack - This port is same as the smartphone audio port to plug in the earphone

Dual USB Ports - No into needed but their main purposes is to plug in keyboard and mouse separately

RJ45 Ethernet LAN - Plug to Internet connections using LAN cable

External Display (Display Serial Interface)  - A methodbeside HDMI to hook up the display to LCD panel

HDMI - Cable that transfer high res pics and sounds to LCD panel that supports it.Recommended to buy a HDMI cable and plug it into the TV

Micro USB - The main source of power for Raspberry Pi comes from here

External Camera Board (Camera Serial Interface) - It is connected to 5MP camera recently launched by Raspberry Pi

 
How to power up this thing ?

Simple,use your smartphone (any brand) charger adapter (with micro USB Type A). To make sure it is working, plug in adapter with rating of 5V and at least 0.7mA and above. Shown here is my adapter for Galaxy S3 charger with 5V and 2A . The extra amps is to provide more juice during its computing intensive calculations.

The design of Raspberry Pis intentionally like that to let the developer to power the board using the smartphone charger means less cost to buy any specialized charger.


Behold, Red LED (PWR) will light on. It indicates the Raspberry Pi is working well

In next section,we are going to talk about the software (OS) setup.

We need the following items (SD Card)