I used a microSD card pre-loaded with the “NOOBS” ( New Out Of the Box Software) system to install Raspbian OS, connected it to Wi-Fi and then updated to the latest version (which at time of writing is v9 a.k.a. There is also an official protective case available to put the Pi inside, if you don’t like looking at bare circuit boards. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ used here, and a wireless keyboard/trackpad for input - of course, you can use pretty much whatever USB input devices you have to hand. The current incarnation is approximately the size of a pack of playing cards. (Although, not all code will be run in the same context, and some may involve using unfamiliar APIs and paradigms, but we can worry about that later…)įor more information on Electron, see: Getting Started with a Piįor those who don’t know, Raspberry Pi is the name for a line of very small, minimalistic, affordable computers first introduced in 2012. As such, the user interface can be designed using technologies familiar to web developers, such as HTML and CSS, instead of requiring them to learn a new design stack.Įlectron is also based on the Node.js JavaScript runtime engine, meaning all code in the application can be written in the same language. What is Electron?Įlectron is a free, open-source, cross-platform library for developing desktop applications, based on the same Chromium rendering engine that underlies the popular Google Chrome web browser. Hopefully these instructions would work just as well for the new model, but we haven’t got our hands on one of those to try it out yet. Specifically, I will be using the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, not the brand new Raspberry Pi 4 which was released a few days ago.

Hi! In this blog post, I’ll be stepping through the basic first steps involved in creating an Electron application on the Raspberry Pi computer.

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