Get started with your Raspberry Pi Zero

Used hardware

• Raspberry Pi Zero WH
• SanDisk Extreme Micro SDHC A1 UHS-I U3 or similar
• micro USB power cable
• USB keyboard
• micro USB to USB adapter
• Mini HDMI adapter

Used software

• OS image for Raspian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) Lite
• Raspberry Pi Imager

Follow installation instructions here which should lead you to a functional micro SD card flashed with the Raspian OS.

Hardware configuration

1. Connect the HDMI cable via mini HDMI adapter to the Pi Zero and an external screen.
2. Connect the USB keyboard via micro USB adapter to the Pi Zero micro-USB port. Use the plug closest to the centre.
3. Plug the micro SD card in its Pi Zero slot.
4. Connect the micro-USB power cable to the Pi Zero. Use the plug furthest from the centre.
5. Pi Zero will startup and display its initialization info on your screen.

Software configuration

Login at the OS prompt with the default credentials.

login=pi
password=raspberry

Run sudo raspi-config to open the configuration menu

• Use this menu to Change User Password
• Use this menu to set all Localisation Options
• Use this menu to enable SSH in the Interfacing Options

• Use this menu to configure your local Wifi in Network Options

Now go back by pressingFinish and restart the networking for the changes to take effect:

sudo service networking restart

Run the following to see your Wifi configuration:

ifconfig wlan0

The IP-address 192.168.178.XX you can now use to connect via SSH from another PC. You can find some SSH client suggestions here.

During the setup, not all locales were set correctly in my case, you can check by running:

locale

If you miss certain values, you can set the missing ones by adding them to your .bashrc. Run the following in the/home/pi directory:

sudo nano .bashrc

And add those lines to the end of your file

export LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8

Shutdown the Raspberry by running:

sudo halt

Wait until the shutdown is finished and the LED turns grey. Then unplug HDMI, USB keyboard and micro-USB power supply.

Then replug micro-USB power supply only.

Connect to your Raspberry through SSH with any SSH client by using the IP-address we saw before:

ssh pi@192.168.178.XX

Then enter the password which you set before inside the console.

Congratulations 🤖🎉🥳, you now have a Raspberry ready to play around with!

If you want to keep regular backups of your Raspberry on macOS, have a look at this manual. Backups take a bit of time, but restoring is relatively fast and should not take you more than 15min for a 64GB SD-card.

If you also got excited about all the fun stuff you can do now, check out my other tutorials:

• 📷 Connect a camera module
• 🗺️ Connect a GPRS module