Working with a Raspberry Pi from another computer

Sometimes it is not practical to work with your Raspberry Pi using your TV and a USB keyboard. This can be because you have turned your Raspberry Pi into a weather station and installed it in your tree-house, or simply because you don’t want to sit in front of the TV working with in when you can use your normal laptop or workstation.

It is easy to work with your Raspberry Pi from another computer – you just need to make sure the raspberry and the computer is on the same local network (i.e. are they connected to the same internet router). If they are we can use a service called SSH to talk to our Raspberry Pi.

Downloading a SSH client

To use SSH from your computer you need a SSH client. The best free SSH client for Windows is called PuTTY and can be downloaded right here:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Once downloaded I recommend moving it to your Desktop since you are going to use it a lot when doing Raspberry Pi projects.

Locating the Raspberry Pi IP Address

Next step is figuring out the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. As you may know the IP address is a unique address on your local network. A different one is assigned to all your connected device – we are going to need the address in order to connect via SSH.

You can find the IP address on the Raspberry Pi boot screen. For the example below the IP address is 192.168.1.6.

Connecting to the Raspberry

Once you know the IP address – start the Putty client and enter the ip address. If you want your can save the information for next time by adding a name under “Saved Sessions” and press “Save”. Note: the ip address of the raspberry may change from time to time – if you cannot connect always check the ip address!

When you are ready to connect press the “Open” button. PuTTY will now display an security warning:

Press “Yes” because we know and trust the computer we are connecting to – you will only have to do this the first time you connect to a new Raspberry Pi.

You can now log in to your Raspberry Pi and fire off any command you want – just as if you where sitting in front of the TV working with it. In case you forgot here is the default login for the Raspberry Pi:

User: pi
Password: raspberry