The Raspberry Pi site at www.raspberrypi.org  is a great place (actually the BEST place) for Pi beginners and we have no desire to reinvent the wheel – so go there first.  Our interest here is mostly in collecting reference information that the Pi site does NOT do a good job presenting, or that involves the Pi as hardware, or as an interaction between the hardware and the Python language running on top of the Raspian operating system of the Pi.

Or maybe of Raspian itself – which is just Unix in disguise. The very first article in this section is a select collection of information about the Pi’s “command line” interface – which is just the natural operating environment for the Raspian system.  It is just the stuff that we wish we could easily have accessed early in our exploration of the Pi and Raspian. We think this small reference could save you days or even weeks if you are just jumping in.   Raspian is by far the most common underlying os for the Pi.  This is just an ultra light look at some of the stuff you will need to know early on when dealing with Raspian – you would grow old trying to learn all there is to know about it.

Python’s GPIO module is the great connector for Python, the outside world, and the Pi.  We’ve been told we did a pretty good job in making it accessible to real people with Big Daddy’s Toolbox number 2, which you can find and review earlier in this site.  A high resolution pdf can be securely downloaded from GitHub.  The design of all of Big Daddy’s toolboxes is for them to be printed two sided on card stock and then laminated.  They are all free and this site (which is produced on a shoestring), you might have noticed, has no cookies, registration, fees, ads or other charges.  We don’t even accept donations.  For us, this stuff is FUN! Here is a link to the toolbox above: https://wp.me/P8cRX9-Q