Patrick Reany
21 January 2024
Note: Assembling the Raspberry Pi 4 kit is not for the non-technical. Nevertheless, if you
are willing to risk building the kit by yourself, you could do it successfully, and if
something goes wrong, at least it's not a lot of money involved.
I recently purchased one of these from Amazon for under $200 (I got the 8GB RAM version).
It's a complete package of minicomputer, heat sinks (to help remove excess heat from the
board), fan, plastic case, MicroSD card, and cables (but not for keyboard or mouse). You can
buy just the accessories or just the computer, but you should buy it altogether if you want the
complete set. One of the cables has an on-off switch, which I like. If you see Raspberry Pi 4
advertized a kit for much less than what I paid, it's probably not the entire kit, so be
careful to check that it has the entire set of parts.
There are many YouTube videos you can watch to help you assemble the kit. I certainly
watched some videos on it. In particular, I believe one that I would recommend for overall
installation is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-4IxW9cgN4
And for instructions just to place the heatsink and fan I used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB9BDq8C3qY
The MicroSD is the last thing you insert into the computer before turning it on. After turning
it on, you should get a screen that gives you an installation menu to choose from. On mine, I
could only choose from one installation; that being the NOOBS install, which is what I wanted
anyway.
(NOOBS = New Out Of Box Software.)
This installation installed a Debian Linux OS (Raspberry Pi OS) with some applications, and,
in my case especially, a full implimentation of Mathematica (version 12.2) for free. Wolfram
said that it wanted to help promote the advance of technology by offering Mathematica free on
the Raspberry Pi platform.
Note: When handling the MicroSD card or the mother board, be careful not to touch the exposed
metal parts so as not to damage the parts with static electricity.
Finally, you might consider having a dedicated notebook to record all significant actions you
take during the OS installation and thereafter. I certainly do.
One thing you can do is to download software from the Internet by going to
Preferences:Add/Remove Software. These lists of software are long and can take
a long time to go through the menu.
Okay, so the advice I've given so far is only enough to get one started. There's
still an entire world of Debian Linux to learn to use your new computer effectively.
I leave that up to you.
The Raspberry Pi is often used to do Embedded Systems Engineering. This doesn't
interest me at all, but maybe that's exactly what you wanted the device for.