Member-only story
Setting up a Headless Raspberry Pi Zero
Most of the time when I use a Raspberry Pi, I’m using them ‘headless.’ Either the boards are embedded inside projects, or hidden away in a cupboard. While they’re connected to the network, there isn’t a monitor, keyboard, or mouse to be seen anywhere. However what seems to surprise a lot of people is that setting them up like that is actually now pretty easy.
Getting the Operating System
Go ahead and download the latest SD Card image of Raspbian, or if you don’t intend to ever use the Raspberry Pi with a monitor—or connect to it using VNC—of Raspbian Lite.
For burning card images these days I’d generally recommend Etcher, made by the folks at Resin.io. It’s cross platform — it works on Windows, Linux and mac OS — and lets you burn an image in four clicks.
However, if you’re a command line person like me, you can either download and install the experimental Etcher command line tools, or you can still go ahead and do it the old way.
The instructions here are for the Mac, because that’s what I have on my desk, but instructions for Linux are similar.
Go ahead and insert the micro SD card into the adaptor, and then the card and the adaptor into your Macbook. Then open up a Terminal window and type df -h, and check the device name for…
