TechnoDogs Knowledge Base

This installation is for preparing a raspberry PI without the desktop portion of operating system. The point here is to reduce dependencies (having a monitor, keyboard, and mouse) and to keep the installation lean.

• A laptop with a MicroSD card reader
• A 8+ GB MicroSD card (SDHC) - Go big for vision/image storage
• A Raspberry PI
• USB Cord with a micro-usb connector
• An ethernet network (this seems like extra devices unlike what I said, but we have to have these networks available. The RIO is a network device, the FRC Radio is a network device, and so are many of the other components on our robots)

• Download and install a sd image writer
  • Etcher writes images to sd cards
  • Win32DiskImager can write images and also clone your sd card
• Download and install Bitvise SSH Client for remote access to PI

For the purpose of home projects and FRC robotics, I will be installing on the Raspbien Lite.

• Download latest PI image - https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest
• Extract the contents of the archive file (unzip it)

• This parts easy - run etcher - choose image - choose drive - flash it

Let windows discover the boot partition by removing your drive and putting it back in. Do not format the main partition by accident. You will need an empty file with no extension named “ssh” in the boot partition. This will enable ssh access by default to the pi. We need this. Unfortunately, creating a file with no extension in Windows isn't as easy as you would think. Create a text document on your Desktop. Load it in notepad. Choose <save as> and navigate to the boot drive and enter “ssh” WITH the quotes and then save.

Now the tricky part. We need to fire this thing up and get access to it.

• Insert sd card into the PI
• Connect the PI via USB to your laptop (power)
• Plug the pi into a physical ethernet network - Create an ethernet network
• Get on your networks router and find your pi's ip address
• Use ssh client to access the pi - username: pi password: raspberry