Setting up Raspberry Pi as a development platform

Raspberry Pi is currently the most basic, ideal hardware environment to get started with learning to code in a particular language or advanced systems development.

#1 – Simple trick for Python development via remote login

While writing this book, we found it convenient to write Python scripts on our laptop/desktop, copy them over to Raspberry Pi, and test them via remote login. This was especially useful when we had Raspberry Pi controlling interfaced to tools on a Christmas tree. It is difficult to set up a monitor and keyboard for Raspberry Pi and work from there.

We used WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/index.php—since we were using a laptop running Windows) to transfer files from the laptop to Raspberry Pi. Then, we used the PuTTY SSH client (http://www.putty.org/) for a remote login to Raspberry Pi and tested the scripts:

• In order to remotely log in to Raspberry Pi or transfer files using WinSCP, OpenSSH is required. The Raspbian...