Introduction: How to Set Up a Micro SD Card for the Raspberry Pi

Tutorial showing how to set up Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi 3 on a Macbook.

I will be using the operating system Raspbian Jessie-PIXEL

The PIXEL stands for 'Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight”

which just means they made the graphical appearance of icons , tool bars etc pretty Geforce 9800 gtx.

Your SD card will stop working. The first thing to consider is the storage you are using on Raspberry Pi. As your system and critical data are on a micro SD card, don’t expect to keep years for life in the same state. The lifespan of a SD card is expected to be of 10 years or more. But, this depends a lot on the model, the usage and how you. I am looking to have a GUI for Mac OS developed that can format and input certain parameters from an Arduino based program to a sleepy pi board (login to view URL) and also format and setup an SD card by installing and changing parameters for a custom Raspberry Pi image.

-Enjoy

Questions ,concerns , compliments all accepted

@NemesisContrer8

For those who have asked I got my Raspberry Pi from Arrow.com since they offer free shipping and a better price than Amazon at $35.00

Step 1: Purchase a Good Quality Micro SD Card

Since it's very common for the generic unbranded black Micro SD Cards to become corrupted A LOT faster it's strongly recommend getting a good quality card to help prevent corruption

A good quality card will also decrease the amount of type it will take for Rasbpian Jessie-Pixel to be copied to the card.

Tips to keep your card 'healthy':

-ALWAYS shutdown your raspberry pi using the shutdown command or desktop shutdown icon

-Try to prevent the card from being physically damaged

List of quality Micro SD Cards used on my Pis:

Samsung Evo 16GB (Used on Raspberry Pi 2 & 3)

SanDisk Extreme 16GB (Used on Raspberry Pi Zero)

Step 2: Download the Operating System-Raspbian

Choose you're OS of choice: Raspbian Jessie Pixel or Raspbian Jessie Lite.

The difference being the latter does not support graphical programs/boot to the desktop while the first does

Click here to click here to pick one

Downloading either will still take a really really long time so do it now!

Once the download is complete you will need to unzip it.

Unzipped the file will be larger than 4GB which throws off Mac's Achive Utility

So we will use help an external program called The Unarchiver download it here

You can delete the The Unarchiver once we finish

-Right click on the Raspbian zip file -->Open With -->The Unarchiver

Step 3: Formatting the Micro SD Card

Download the SD Card formatting software from this link.

This software quickly and easily formats the card into FAT32 format for the Pi's boot loader to be able to read.

- Stick your Micro SD card into the SD adapter into your laptop/desktop.

-Open up the SD Card Formatter application

-Select the card being formatted (take note of the disk number next to the name mine was disk2)

- Select Quick Format-->format

Wait a couple minutes once the process is complete a message will appear saying 'The Format is Complete'

Step 4: Transferring Raspbian to the Card

In order to place Rasbpian in the Micro SD card we will need to unmount the card

To do this launch Disk Utility (make sure the card is selected) Crack for mac games.

Then select 'Unmount'

Open up the Terminal

Make adjustments to the following line before copying and pasting it to the terminal:

-replace 2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie.img with the exact name of the unzipped file of Raspian

-for the ending rdisk2, replace the 2 with the disk number noted in Step 2 of this instructable

- if the command fails try it again, change the ending to disk2 instead of rdisk2

Copy and paste the modified line to the terminal

You will be asked for you Mac's password

The the cursor will begin to blink meaning Raspbian is being transferred successfully

Estimated waiting time is about 3~5 minutes

Step 5: Eject Your Micro SD Card

After Raspbian has been transferred:

- Go to your desktop

-Right click on the 'boot' card image

-Then Select Eject Volume

-Pop the Micro SD card into the back of your Raspberry Pi

-Find a good 5V/2.5 AMP recommended but 5V/2A power supply will also work

You're finished!

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There are a lot of instructions available on how to set up a Raspberry Pi SD Card using a Windows PC. I thought I would share my method of doing this on an Apple Mac.
First download the image you would like to burn onto the SD Card. Generally I use Raspbian, and think this is a good place to start. The latest image can be found from here.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
The file is fairly large so can take several minutes to download, depending on your internet connection, so it is worth starting the download before proceeding.
Now it is important to take a note of the locally mounted disks before inserting the SD Card. To do this you will have to open the Apple Mac Terminal. This is found under Utilities within the Applications folder.
Once in the terminal on the mac type the following:
df -h
This should list all the locally mounted drives.

Now connect the SD Card into a USB port. I have a small USB SD Card reader for this purpose. If you need one these they can be picked up very cheaply from the internet.
Once the card is inserted you need to again type:
df -h

You should now be able to compare the first and second instances of df -h. As you can see I now have an additional drive /dev/disk2s1 connected to my Apple Mac.
It is worth checking that the additional drive looks as expected. I know my SD Card is 8 GB unformatted, and is called UNTITLED, which ties in with the 7.4GB (always less when formatted) stated against /dev/disk2s1. Getting the name wrong could have disastrous consequences. You have been warned..
In the command line now unmount the disk by typing:
diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

If your file has finished downloading you will need to unzip it before continuing with the installation.
To do this double click on the .zip file you have downloaded and this should start to unzip.
Again this next part is important so care should be taken.

How To Format Sd Card For Raspberry Pi Mac

If your SD Card inserted shows up as /dev/disk2s1 you will have to type rdisk2 in the next stage i.e. you ignore the /dev/ and the s1 part, but add an r in front of disk.
Next you need to know which directory you downloaded and unzipped the file into. Normally this is in your Downloads folder. If you downloaded it elsewhere you should change the path to the file. Ensure you also change the filename to match the file you have downloaded. For a file called 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img in the Downloads folder I would type:
dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk2

If you get a permission denied message use sudo before the command. i.e.
sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk2
Then type your Apple Macs password when asked.

Install Raspberry Pi On Sd Card Mac

This stage takes several minutes, so please be patient.

Raspberry Pi Sd Card Format

Finally type:
diskutil eject /dev/rdisk2
again modifying this to match as previously discussed.
Your SD Card is now ready with the latest version of Raspbian installed. Enjoy!