Hi Guys, This is Naveen and I am part of the instructor team at MAKERDEMY.
In this first episode of “Learn Technology in 5 minutes”, you will learn how to access your Raspberry Pi remotely through your laptop.
The brand new Raspberry Pi 4 has been out for a few months now. People say that the Raspberry Pi 4 is a pocket sized Desktop Replacement.
Just by connecting a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, you can essentially have a PC at your home in under 50$. But Raspberry Pi 4 is much more than just a desktop.
It can be used as a prototyping tool to do physical computing, by interfacing its GPIO pins with peripherals.
Because of the wide variety of its use cases, there will be times when you can’t or you don’t want the Raspberry Pi to be always connected to a monitor, keyboard or a mouse
Perhaps you’re using another computer and you only have peripherals for your main Desktop. Maybe you have installed your Raspberry Pi 4 behind your TV or a nest of cables and it is out of reach.
It is at times like this you wish you had some kind of remote communication with your Raspberry Pi 4.
In this walk through, you will be able to learn the straightforward and easy way to setup the Pi and work with it remotely from the first boot itself without ever connecting any mouse, monitor or keyboard.
First you need to download and install mainly 4 software on your PC and they are Balena Etcher, Advanced IP Scanner, PuTTY & VNC Viewer.
We have given the links to all these apps down in the description of this video. All these apps have Mac Versions too, thus you don’t need to worry if you are an Apple User.
The first thing you have to do is download the Raspbian OS from the official downloads page and then open Balena Etcher, and click select image. Now select the zip file you have just downloaded.
After that, connect you MicroSD Card to your Laptop and click flash to start flashing the card. Once flashing is done, access the Boot Drive of the MicroSD Card.
As we are doing a headless installation, we need to manually enable SSH and also add WiFi credentials of the network to the MicroSD card before the first boot.
For that, you need to create 2 new files in the boot drive. 1.ssh file with no extension 2.wpa_supplicant.conf file and add these lines in them.
Make sure you change the country ID and your Network Credentials before saving.
Now your microSD Card is ready to be put in the Pi for the first time. Once the microSD Card is inserted and the Pi 4 properly powered on, connect your laptop to the same WiFi Network as the Pi.
Now go to your command prompt in Windows and type ipconfig and get the default gateway.
The same information can be obtained by typing ifconfig in the terminal on Mac OS. Our next task is to find the exact IP address of the Raspberry Pi 4.
For this we are going to scan the whole network using the IP Scanner.
You can see that, when we can scan with the default gateway range, the raspberry pi device shows up with IP address information.
Now open PuTTY & enter this IP address and authenticate the signature and login using the default username & password. That is pi & raspberry.
Now you are in the terminal window of the Raspberry Pi. Next type sudo raspi-config and go to interfacing options. Here you should enable the VNC option.
Now create a VNC server on the Pi to by entering vncserver.
Finally open the VNC Viewer App in your PC and enter the IP address as shown in the PuTTy terminal. Now you need to authenticate the server by entering the default username and password.
Now you will be greeted with the GUI of the Raspbian Buster on the Laptop. You have now successfully completed a headless installation and remotely accessed the Raspberry Pi’s GUI.
That is all folks. If you like this video, smash the subscribe button and ring the bell to be updated about our future video releases.
