hello,
I’ve purchased the brick pi for my son and cannot get it to run. I’ve followed the steps through programming the sd card but when I connect to monitor, I’ve got a blank screen. I don’t know if I’ve done the initial steps properly. I initially did this months ago and it’s been sitting out of sheer frustration. I’m not a techy mom and truthfully, all the steps are a little bit confusing to me.
Which version of BrickPi do you have? See here to determine (BrickPi, BrickPi+, or BrickPi3).
Which OS image did you flash to the SD card?
Do the LEDs on the Raspberry Pi and BrickPi power on, indicating that the system is powered?
Hi Matt,
It’s the brick pi 3.
As far as os image to SD card…I clicked on the link for having your own sd card. After that, we couldn’t figure out if it had worked.
We do get power lights on both the raspberry and brick pi. We tried hooking it up to the TV monitor the other day though and got nothing on the screen.
We have several OS images. For the BrickPi3, I recommend Raspbian for Robots, not Dexter OS. In order for the Raspberry Pi to output HDMI video, I believe the connection needs to be made (and the TV/monitor probably has to be turned on) before powering up the Raspberry Pi.
Typically the BrickPi3 is used without a monitor (“headless mode”). To use the RPi + BP3 in headless mode, connect an Ethernet cable from the RPi to your router, so your computer and the RPi are on the same local area network. You can log into your router to determine the LAN IP address of the RPi, or on your computer you can run something like Advanced IP Scanner. Once you know the IP address of the RPi, you can open a browser tab and go to the address. From there you can view the desktop or open an in-browser terminal. Once you have a connection established, you can configure WiFi on the RPi so you can disconnect the Ethernet cable.