TL;DR: The Raspberry Pi 2 has an A/V jack in addition to HDMI, who knew?! Here’s my experience getting started (Spoiler: It worked - eventually).
Oddly enough, one of the things delaying me most about getting started on this project was not owning a television.
Receiving the kit in the mail was a good start, but some key pieces were BYO. Such as a USB mouse (Check!), a USB keyboard (Not sure…), and an HDMI monitor (Oh, boy!). Definitely out of luck on this one; being an unemployed college student, resources were pretty scarce and a television/monitor wasn’t in my budget.
Thankfully, Les, in his post on the Wi-Pi module (http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-accessories/blog/2015/07/21/getting-to-know-wi-pi-and-piview) happened to mention that the audio jack was actually a composite A/V jack. Until then I had hopes of initiating this unit 'Headless,' but by most accounts found that to be impossible.
This was awesome! It was only a few more weeks after that when a friend was moving offices and agreed to loan me a handy 7” television set with composite in jacks and an old keyboard! (I happened to have had a composite breakout cable laying about from an old camcorder.) Jump ahead a rough start to the semester and midterms and here we are!
....Welp. That didn’t work. I’m not sure what has gone wrong with this setup. I tried another AV cable. I tried the other SD and the other Raspberry Pi. Neither one worked. There was a brief flicker from the activity light and then the dullness of power. Never a display.
Back to digging… A few hours and a few searches, downloads, reformats, and network scans later…. Turns out that a fresh installation of Raspbian and the video signal comes through the right audio channel! Why not?
Alright. That’s great. Looks good. But unusable on this display.
Next on this Thread: How to use the GUI over SSH/VNC? I've tried Terminal, Safari, and Screen Sharing: No dice.
Thank you for reading and following. Any tips, suggestions, or resources are welcome, please comment or message me.
Thank you, Adafruit, Mathworks, and element14 for your sponsorship.
Previously:
Blog Entry 1: Hello! Teacher's Pet Students' Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator — Blog Entry 1: Hello!
Blog Entry 2: Design Constraints Teacher's Pet Students' Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator — Blog Entry 2: Design Constraints
Blog Entry 3: Background Teacher’s Pet Students’ Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator — Blog Entry 3: Background
Blog Entry 4: Unboxing Teacher's Pet Students' Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator—Blog Entry 4: Unboxing!
Blog Entry 5: Design Concept Teacher's Pet Students' Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator—Blog Entry 5: Design Concept
Tags: “teachers_pet” “attendance_automator” “raspbery_pi” “adafruit” "mathworks"