First things first, gather the bits, put them all in a safe place.

The Raspberry Pi is the core part of this project, it allows the display board to stand alone, connected to the network. Anyone familiar with developing with the RPi will be able to get started easily. And the power offered in such a compact package is ideal for complex scripts.

I put the Debian Wheezy on my SD card as I figured it was the most popular and the most help would be available if I ran into problems. I downloaded it from here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Once that was done I connected the RPi up to the keyboard, mouse, Ethernet and HDMI so I could run the first configuration. This is pretty much solely to get SSH access to the RPi which will be our main method of controlling the RPi. I also enabled SPI as we'll be using that to drive the display. Once I'd done that I saved the SD Card image back on to my main PC. There's nothing more frustrating than having to do that step multiple times.

The next project log will go over installing the code.