This is part of my series on learning to build an End-to-End Analytics Platform project.
TLDR; My very first Pi and sense HAT was graciously gifted to me by Jonathan Wade (LinkedIn). I assembled it. Tried to go headless. Ended up adding a head because reasons. Ran through initial setup and updates. Configured OpenSSH on Windows and SSH on the Pi to get to the headless state.
I got gifted something amazing! Yup, my first Raspberry Pi. Not only that, a Sense HAT too! Now for many people that might mean much, but this is a pretty big moment for me. To save you from another unboxing experience I took the liberty by doing that privately and cut to the end. Behold! The unboxed product:
Looking through what we have here. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (top left), the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT (bottom middle), a SanDisk 32GB microSD card, some spacers, screws, power cable, and a HDMI to mini HDMI cable.
Assembling the unit was really simple. Just a quick look at the Sense Hat board and we can see some amazing things:
- Air Pressure sensor
- Temperature and humidity sensor
- Accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer
- 8×8 LED matrix display
- Even a small joystick!
This device is pretty EPIC and it’s not even powered it on yet. So many things I haven’t ever worked with but can’t wait to try and figure them out.
Next up power and networking. The moment I connected the power a rainbow 🌈 filled the room. A sign of a pot o’learnings 🪙 to be found at the end of this experience.
Nice! Now we have the whole unit assembled. What’s the plan? Well, the thinking is to use this to deploy and run Azure SQL Edge on it. Why? A few reasons:
- I have never worked with a Raspberry Pi
- I haven’t really work on Linux at all
- I have never done any work with Azure IoT solutions, or IoT at all for that matter
- I do know Azure SQL reasonably well, though not Azure SQL Edge
- Azure SQL Edge has a bunch of interesting things data streaming, time series analysis, and ONNX AI/ML capabilities. None of which I have worked with.
I didn’t connect any screen at this stage. It’s known as “headless”. We need a way to connect to the Pi though. We have the Windows Terminal and found that we can use SSH to connect to the Pi from a Windows 10+ machine.
That didn’t work. Apparently SSH has been disabled by default. Considering I don’t have a microSD card reader, it’s time to put a “head” on nearly headless Pi and connect a screen 🖥️. The HDMI cable, a keyboard, and a mouse later and we are connected. I ran through the setup, updated the password, downloaded the latest updates, then set up SSH. There are other security best practices that I am going to follow as well after this post. Then tried to connect again and…success!
Next I shut the Pi down. Disconnected the screen, mouse, and keyboard. I’m going to try work on this device remotely so I don’t need those peripherals right now.
Now that we have an IoT device I am going to start exploring if there are any open data sets that I can start using and feed some of the device telemetry into the end-to-end analytics solution as a cohesive project. We are going to set up additional services in our solution to support IoT device which will be fun.
Until next time.
🐜
Anthony Fourie 