Step 1
I know there must be other potential RPi newbies trying to set up for the first time and it's pretty difficult to find out how to get it up and running for pool stuff without taking an entire RPi school or taking a LOT of time from one of our gracious tech experts that really have other things to do. So I thought I would add this post to show newbies exactly what I had to to do get up and running each step of the way thus the title here is Step 1 others will follow and I'll consolidate them after I get this running. First
buy the kit I did on (@guiness recommendation and it worked great!) There are literally hundreds of other places to buy and kits to get of course. Then Google "assemble RPi 3b" and watch one of the videos. Easy Peasy. Next install docker. Why do this? It's almost the only way a newbie can get software installed on an RPi. It's not as simple as windows or dos on an RPi. You have to enter all kinds of commands and install a myriad of other software to make a prgram work. Docker fixes all this by allowing developers to produce an image that is used by docker to take care of this for you. This newbie strongly recommends you do it this way after he tried to ignore expert advice from
@guinness to use docker... wasted hours of my time as a result!
There are other stumbling blocks even when you decide to take the expert advice. Not sure exactly why but you can't just google "install docker on my RPi 3b" and follow the instructions. I think this has to do with the version of the chip and OS. I found one
here that works after trying 4 other sets of commands in similar articles... more frustrating hours wasted!
Learning this RPi stuff takes perseverance, determination, and some help from experts. But there's hope for almost everybody if I can do it! My last programming language was Fortran IV in the 70's!
Only other thing that really helps is to do everything to set this up on the RPi itself. You can open a terminal window and copy/paste right in from the websites that tell how to do this. Much easier even if you're not "typing challenged" like me.
I'll post Step 2 after I get the gateway image running.
I hope this is helpful.
Chris