As some of you guys know Raspberry Pi computers are quite awesome and you can get the whole computer just on a single tiny board & past back the Raspberry Pi 3 was quite popular since it has quite the specs for a computer but the only downside was they are a little costly for the guy who usually use Arduino in his project because i always bought a Chinese clone of Arduino for 5$ or 6$ but for the pi i have to put 35$ in my project and if my project doesn’t need a WiFi connectivity then i can go for Pi Zero for 5$ – 6$ but in year 2017 they actually did something great they released ‘Raspberry Pi Zero W’ which actually is a revision of Pi zero with WiFi and costs 10$ (price may vary in different countries).
As talking about the specs of Raspberry pi zero w has following features:-
- 1GHz, Single-core CPU
- 512MB RAM
- Mini HDMI and USB On-The-Go ports
- Micro USB power
- HAT-compatible 40-pin header
- Composite video and reset headers
- CSI camera connector
- 802.11n wireless LAN
- Bluetooth 4.0
So the only problem to get started with Pi Zero W is we need a HDMI display for that and that will not be cost efficient so i thought about SSH into Pi Zero W using my PC but the another problem is SSH is disabled in recent updates by Raspberry organization by default so in this post we gonna see how to enable it and how to boot our pi Zero W.
So for this you need few things before getting started:
1- Raspberry Pi Zero W : Buying Link 1 , Buying Link 2
2- Memory Card : Buying Link
3- USB Cable : Buying Link
4- USB Card Reader
Then after getting all this above stuff you need to download the the softwares given below:
1- SD Card Formatter : Download link(not necessary to download you can use anything to format your SD card).
2- Etcher Tool : Download Link (used to burn Raspberry Pi OS on SD card, any image burner software will work but this one is great and recommended by Raspberry Pi organization).
3- Raspbian OS : Download Link (Download OS from the Raspberry official website).
4- Notepad++ : Download Link (used to edit OS files, using any other tool to edit like Notepad instead of Notepad++ then it will destroy the formatting of the file and you have to flash the whole OS again to the SD Card).
5- Putty Software : Download Link (we will use Putty to communicate(SSH) to the Pi ).
6- Bonjour : Download Link (to make the Putty work in your PC install Bonjour).
7- Raspberry Pi Ethernet USB Drivers : Download Link (Download it and we will install these drivers into device manager of our PC after connecting Pi to PC).
Since after downloading all these softwares, make sure you install all (except Raspbian OS and Raspberry Pi Ethernet USB Drivers) on your PC.
So then connect SD card to PC and format it.
Then open the Etcher Tool and select the Raspberry Pi image and select your SD card and hit Flash and after few minutes your OS will be flashed on your SD card.
After Flashing the image plug your SD card into PC again and open it and you’ll find a file named “config.txt” and open it Notepad++ (don’t open it with Notepad , it will destroy the file formatting)
And after opening the file with Notepad++ go to the bottom of the file and add the given text :
dtoverlay=dwc2
then save the file and open another file named “cmdline.txt” and open it with Notepad++ then find a part in the file “rootwait”
After “rootwait” in the file put this following code and make sure it will be exactly like this :
modules-load=dwc2,g_ether
and save this file too, then create another file in the SD card and rename it as “ssh” and save it with no extensions.
Then make sure you installed Bonjour on your Pi, if not then install it and then put your SD card into pi and connect the USB cable into USB port of pi (not the power port) and connect the cable to PC and your pi will start to boot which will be indicated by yellow/green LED on it.
After this Go to device manager into your PC and see if you see any RDNIS or Ethernet or USB Device with yellow mark which needs to update its drivers then right click on it and update the drivers as we downloaded above in software “Raspberry Pi Ethernet USB Drivers” and install these drivers.
Then open Putty software and in the Hostname type “raspberrypi.local” then click open and a new window will pop up.
And in the new window you just need to type the Login as : “pi” and the password will be “raspberry” and hit enter and you’ll be logged into Pi.
So now you can execute your commands from this shell window, you can enable WiFi, get the IP of Pi and installing new features you can do that from this window and if want more information regarding this post then watch the video given below it will not only tell you this whole process in detail but few additional commands and things about Raspberry pi, so if have queries or issues then let me know.