More details - http://blog.gbaman.info/?p=791
For this method, alongside your Pi Zero, MicroUSB cable and MicroSD card, only an additional computer is required, which can be running Windows (with Bonjour, iTunes or Quicktime installed), Mac OS or Linux (with Avahi Daemon installed, for example Ubuntu has it built in).
1. Flash Raspbian Jessie full or Raspbian Jessie Lite onto the SD card.
2. Once Raspbian is flashed, open up the boot partition (in Windows Explorer, Finder etc) and add to the bottom of the config.txt
file dtoverlay=dwc2
on a new line, then save the file.
3. If using a recent release of Jessie (Dec 2016 onwards), then create a new file simply called ssh
in the SD card as well. By default SSH is now disabled so this is required to enable it. Remember - Make sure your file doesn't have an extension (like .txt etc)!
4. Finally, open up the cmdline.txt
. Be careful with this file, it is very picky with its formatting! Each parameter is seperated by a single space (it does not use newlines). Insert modules-load=dwc2,g_ether
after rootwait
. To compare, an edited version of the cmdline.txt
file at the time of writing, can be found here.
5. That's it, eject the SD card from your computer, put it in your Raspberry Pi Zero and connect it via USB to your computer. It will take up to 90s to boot up (shorter on subsequent boots). It should then appear as a USB Ethernet device. You can SSH into it using raspberrypi.local
as the address.
Hardware: Pi Zero w/o WiFi, Pi Zero USB Stem (Adafruit)
Pi OS:
2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img
Host OS: Ubuntu v20.10 (Groovy Gorilla)
I needed to perform a few more steps to
ssh
into the Pi.After waiting for the Pi to boot...
nm-connection-editor
from the Host OSenxbed891078ed1
)ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
, password:raspberry
It still amazes me that its possible to get a Pi up and running without a keyboard and mouse.