software-setup.md

⚙ configuring the Raspberry Pi for project

Note

The following set of instructions assumes you are running Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

We will need to get pip. Doesn't seem to get packaged by default.

sudo apt install python3-pip

and we need to enable I2C and SPI with the following commands

sudo raspi-config nonint do_i2c 0

sudo raspi-config nonint do_spi 0

We also need to increase the SPI buffer size, as the default is only 4096 bytes. To do so, we edit cmdline.txt by running

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

and we add the following entry to increase the buffer size to 65536 bytes:

spidev.bufsiz=65536  

Important

Note that after setting these new values you will need to restart the raspberry pi for the changes to go into effect.

🐍 Python packages

Finally, we will need to install some python packages:

sudo apt install python3-smbus

sudo apt install python3-spidev

sudo apt install python3-numpy

sudo apt install python3-pillow

Note

For some reason Pi OS Lite doesn't love installing via pip, so the commands above are used. I am sure you could install it via pip with minimal effort.