Raspberry Pi Headless Install

How To, IoT, Posts, Raspberry Pi, Single-Board Computing

Raspberry Pi Headless Install

How To, IoT, Posts, Raspberry Pi, Single-Board Computing

Don’t have an extra keyboard or HDMI cable? Here’s how to do a headless Raspbian install on your Pi.

Step 1. Download Raspbian image

Head on over here to grab a copy of the Raspbian image. The “Lite” version will do.

Download Rasbian

Step 2. Write image to SD card

Write the image to SD card. You can find detailed instructions here.

Write the Rasbian image using Win32DiskImager

Step 3. Add “ssh” file to the SD card root

Enable SSH by placing a file named “ssh” (without any extension) onto the boot partition of the SD card.

ssh file

Step 4. Boot your Pi

Pop your prepared SD card, power and a network cable into the Pi.

Raspberry Pi, powered up and ready to go

Step 5. Find your Pi’s IP address

To configure your Pi, you need the IP address. You can find this in your Router’s DHCP lease allocation table:

DHCP lease allocation table

Step 6. SSH into your Pi

Use your favourite SSH client (I prefer PuTTY) to access the Pi. The default credentials are:

username: pi
password: raspberry

SSH into your Pi

Step 7. Configure your Pi

That’s it! You can now configure your Pi via sudo raspi-config

Invoke raspi-config

raspi-config

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