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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

1. Choose what sort of Raspberry Pi you want. Choose carefully because even if this doesn’t matter, you think it matters.

2. Buy that thing and wait for it to be delivered

3. Decide what Linux distributation you want. Choose carefully because even if this doesn’t matter, you think it matters.

4. Download the Linux distribution. Make sure that you don’t accidentally download one for the wrong architecture...

5. Somehow work out what to do with a .iso

6. Start installing Linux distribution (may need to set up network)

7. Decide on programming language. Choose carefully because even if this doesn’t matter, you think it matters.

8. Decide what you want to do

9. Part of what you want to do is hard/not supported/you don’t know the “right way”. Figure out how to get round this (if possible)

10. ???

11. Congratulations. You have now started.

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I see where you're coming from, but these are gross exaggerations in the vein of infomercials depicting performing mundane tasks without their product as nearly impossible.

First, the software could be packaged as an OS image for the pi itself, eliminating a fair chunk of your list, but second, the alternative presented on this page is to assemble the hardware from a list that includes resistors.

Surely if you can manage that, you can wrangle an iso.

There are a whole heap of gotchas that don't seem like a big deal if you're a savvy adult programmer, but are showstoppers if you're eleven years old and just getting into proper computing.

The Raspberry Pi is a very useful thing, but Eben Upton will freely admit that it was the wrong solution for the intended audience. It's just too complex and too brittle to work as a "modern BBC micro" for educational use. The lessons learned from RPi led to the BBC micro:bit, a much simpler Cortex M0 development board that has been a roaring success in British schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Bit

The BASIC Engine isn't a suitable educational tool as-is, but it could become very useful if it's offered as a commercial product with HDMI or VGA output.

Ordered a RPi Zero W from Adafruit on a Saturday, got it on a Wednesday. Took about two hours to get through a headless install of Raspbian [1], most of which was fighting with my Mac's Disk Utility.

Not knocking the BASIC Engine, I think it's cool as heck, just pointing out that getting started on RPi is not really as painful as it once was. You can even purchase an SD card preloaded with Raspbian!

1. https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-creation/overvi...

A bit OT, but if your hassle with disk utility was related to imaging your card, I'd recommend https://etcher.io/ . It's an unbelievably simple and friendly tool.

I see where you're coming from, but let's be honest, that's still way faster and easier than the BASIC Engine, unless the author offers a way to order pre-built sets.

Or you could buy one of the kits that has everything you need, including a copy of Rasbian on the included uSD card.

> Binaries are available on Github in the firmware repository. They can be uploaded to the system via the serial port, using esptool

Good luck flashing the firmware on this thing over a serial port. I'd much rather emulate the platform on a pi, so that I can repurpose the device for something more useful when I realize how big of a waste of time it is to use BASIC for new projects. Source: I use BASIC at work and it sucks butt.

There are a lot of guides to this, and one click Windows install tools for images etc. It's kind of the point of the Pi.

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