I’m toying with the idea of a robot that can interact with its environment by pattern recognition. I thought the way to do this was with a raspberry pi computer. So I bought the computer and the pi camera from Maker Shed, and expected that all I would have to do is connect a USB cable to my laptop to begin programming the pi.

Well, not exactly. It turns out that what I need on both the pi and my laptop is a program called VNC, and VNC doesn’t come on the preloaded OS card that I got for the pi. I can download VNC for my laptop easily enough, but it appears that I’ll need a monitor and keyboard connected to the pi in order to download VNC onto it. There may be a way around that, but it looks like I’m about to make a trip to Goodwill for a cheap monitor and keyboard.