Configure your Raspberry Pi without Keyboard and Display

 As an intensive Raspberry Pi user you have an image with a suitable OS just in case. For example, my images are all preconfigured for my private networks and I just have to copy them to an SD card and put them into the Raspberry. Then I can start right away - with whatever. The configuration of a new Rasbian can usually be done by bringing the small single board computer with a network cable into the LAN.

But there are circumstances where these approaches don't help and the circumstances don't allow you to connect the Raspberry to the network via the network cable and only WLAN is available. There is an easy way to do this configuration on a laptop directly after copying the Raspbian image to the SD card. I describe the steps for Windows, Linux and (soon) OSX.

I refer here to the standard Rasbian, the Howto does NOT work with Raspbian lite. (Stand 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img)

The image is downloaded from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/.

I refer here to the standard Rasbian image, the Howto does NOT work with the Raspbian lite image. (Stand 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img)

Initial configuration using Windows

Copy the downloaded image to the SD Card using WinDiskImager32 

Then a part (one of two partitions) of the copied image is visible in Windows Explorer.

A new file called wpa_supplicant.conf is created in this area. The following information will be added to this file (I like to use Notepad++ or Textpad for editing) 

update_config=1
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev

network={
   &nbsp ssid="SSID"
    psk="Passwort"
}

Once the file is saved it can be used in the Raspberry. When the Raspberry is started, it gets an IP address from the WLAN which can be used to access the Raspberry. Most routers or access points have a web frontend which can be used to find out the IP address of the Raspberry. If this is not possible, a network scanner will help. Scanning the whole network is not (that easy) possible with Windows onboard tools. On iOS and Android Smartphones I have Fing for this.

Initial configuration using Windows

Under Linux you can copy the image with the dd command to the SD card. First you have to check the device name of the SD card under Linux. Before the card is inserted the mounted storage devices are listed. This is done with the command: 

df -h

Then the SD card is inserted and the command 

df -h

is executed again. The return should contain

/dev/mmcblk0p1

or

/dev/sdd1

I will use the mmcblk0p1 in this case. Afterwards the device is unmounted with umount. If there are several partitions on the SD card (recognizable by mmcblk0p2, mmcblk0p3, ...), all of them have to be unmounted.

Afterwards the image can be copied to the SD card. It is important that the image is copied to the SD card and not to a partition. Therefore the name to copy to is /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/sdd and not /dev/mmcblk0p1 or /dev/sdd1.

The command to copy is:

dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

Of course you can also copy with your preferred GUI on a current Ubuntu (16.x). This is quite easy with the usb-imagewriter. The usb-imagewriter must be installed.

After the card has been written, the SD card must be remounted. The easiest way is to remove the card for a short time and plug it in again. 

df -h

With you can see that the card has two partitions. One partition is called /dev/mmcblk0p1 and the other /dev/mmcblk0p2. Here the smaller partition with a size of about 50 to 100MB is interesting. On this partition we will copy the WLAN information, which will be moved to the right place later on the first start of Raspbian in Raspberry.

In the terminal I open the file wpa_supplicant.conf with the command: 

sudo wpa_passphrase testwifi testpassword >> /dev/ mmcblk0p1/wpa_supplicant.conf

and all information for the WIFI configuration needs to be inserted with the following structure:

update_config=1
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
    ssid="testwifi"
    #psk="testpassword"
    psk=d28f6e7bcc45536a1930c0010f1d8a8e16c5dc154cc1309ae97859f2586924df
}

In order to connect to the Raspberry later, the IP address must be obtained. If the MAC address (or the manufacturer code) is known, the Raspberry is started and after a few moments scanned for the Raspberry with nMap. The manufacturer code (called OUI) can be found at http://aruljohn.com/mac.pl. Click on vendor lookup in the input mask and enter the manufacturer of the map.

The MAC address part 80:F1:02 is here exemplary for my Edimax WIFI USB adapter. 

nmap -sP 192.168.50.0/24 | awk '/^Nmap/{ip=$NF}/80:F1:02/{print ip}'

Now you known everything to connect to your Raspberry with SSH. Have fun :)

Configure WIFI on Raspbian before the first boot

Usually when I prepare a Raspberry for a new project or just want set up a new operation system I configured the network with attached screen and keyboard. Sometimes this is not possible and the WIFI needs to be configured before the first boot of the Pi.

The actual Raspbian distribution Jessie released on May 27 216 (NOT the lite version) or newer brings a cool feature to preconfigure the WIFI settings. A keyboard and a screen aren't necessary to bring a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian to life.

Configuration on Windows

1. download the Raspbian image on RapsberryPi.org and extract it
2. if you don't have download the Win32DiskImager to copy the image to the SD card
3. insert the SD card in your card reader (micro SD cards with adapter, start the Win32Diskimager (it will ask to run as Administrator), and select the extracted image file (from 1)
   
4. click "Write" to start the transfer of the image to the SD card 
5. when the process is finished successfully, you should see a part of the SD card in Windows Explorer
   
6. right click into the SD card folder and create a new text-file with the name wpa_supplicant.conf
7. open the file (if possible with Textpad or Notepad++) copy the following text into the file, ensure the bold parts are changed to your WIFI, the quote marks are necessary
   
   
   update_config=1
   ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
   network={
       ssid="testwifi"
       psk="testpassword"   
   }
   
   
8. save the file, move the SD card from your computer to the Raspberry and start it 

During the first boot of Raspbian, the file wpa_supplicant.conf will be moved into the folder /etc/wpa_supplicant/ for future starts the WIFI credentials will be in the right place and the Raspberry should be able to connect to the WIFI. The file will be not longer accessible under Windows. 

Configuration on Linux

1.  download the Raspbian image on RapsberryPi.org and extract it
2. before inserting the SD card, check the attached devices with this command:
   
   
   df -h
   
   
3. then insert the SD card and repeat the command after a few seconds
   
   
   df -h
   
   in the output you should find a line like
   
   
   /dev/mmcblk0p1
   
   or
   
   
   /dev/sdd1
   
   okay in this example I will use "mmcblk0p1".
4. With the command:
   
   
   mount
   
   you need to check if the SD card is mounted somewhere. If so, unmount the SD card with
   
   
   sudo umount /mnt/sdcrd
   
   
5. Because df shows the partition and we want to copy the image file to the device, the name of the device in the copy command will be /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/ssd 
6. when the device name of the SD card is known, the image file can be copied there. the command is:
   
   
   dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
7. after the successful copy to the SD card, the card can be removed and reinserted. There will be a check for the partitions again
   
   
   df -h
   
   in the output you should find again the same /dev/mmcblk0p1device with the command
   
   
   mount
   
   you will see the mountpoint of the SD card (in this example should be /mnt/sdcrd) 
8. in this folder should be files like
   
   
   bcm2708-rpi-b.dtb
   bcm2708-rpi-b-plus.dtb
   bcm2708-rpi-cm.dtb
   bcm2708-rpi-2-b.dtb
   bcm2708-rpi-3-b.dtb
   bootcode.bin
   cmdline.txt
   config.txt
   ...
9. with the command (change in the command mywifi to your SSID and mypassword to the password of your WIFI)
   
   
   sudo wpa_passphrase mywifi mypassword >> mnt/sdcrd/wpa_supplicant.conf
   
   you will create a file wpa_supplicant.conf in this folder
10. now the SD card can be unmounted
    
    
    sudo umount /mnt/sdcrd
    
    the card can be removed and inserted in the Raspberry. 

While starting the Raspberry the first time, the file wpa_supplicant.conf will be moved to it's usual location in /etc/wpa_supplicant. The Pi will connect with the configured WIFI during boot and you can use SSH to connect to the Raspberry. The default login is
username: pi
password: raspberry