A raspberry PI works just like a normal computer except that its hard drive is a sd card.

Which means the OS installation is a bit different. But also much simpler than installing a “normal” operating system.

Now let’s download the raspberry pi operating system at: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_full_latest

For our purpose the “Raspberry Pi OS Lite” will be enough.
But you can take the “Raspberry Pi OS with desktop” one if you’re new to raspberry pi’s. That will help with troubleshooting.

Download it, but don’t unzip it, it’s not necessary.

The purpose of this step is to write the operating system on the sd card.

Good thing is, the guys from balena.io did the perfect tool for us.

Download BalenaEtcher from this link: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Now start BalenaEtcher, it works in three steps:

- First select the raspberry pi os zip file you’ve previously downloaded.
- Insert your SD card in your windows computer sd card reader, no need to format. Select your sd card in balenaEtcher.
- Press the “Flash!” button.

Once the raspberry PI OS is written to the sd-card, this one should show up as a normal usb drive on your computer.

This new drive should be called “Boot”. It’s actually a little part of the raspberry PI OS, you shouldn’t change any of the existing files.
But we’re going to add a few files there.

First thing to do is enable remote access, that will allow us to use the raspberry PI over the network from our computer, instead of having to add a screen and keyboard.

For this, go to the sd-card drive, and create an empty file called “ssh”. On windows this requires a special operation, because windows usually adds a hidden extension to the file, you could end up with a file called “ssh.txt” instead of just “ssh”.

- Run the notepad app
- Create a new file, its only content is a white space
- Choose “Save as”, and make sure to set “Save as type” to “All files”, that will avoid ending up with a hidden extension.
- Call the file “ssh”, and save it.

Now we’ll obviously want our raspberry PI to be connected to our home wifi network.

Again, we don’t have a graphical interface to select our wifi as we usually do on mobiles or computers.

Setting up the wifi config also implies creating a file in the sd-card drive.

Like in the previous step, open notepad, copy the content below into the new file:

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

network={
    ssid="NETWORK-NAME"
    psk="NETWORK-PASSWORD"
}

And then save the file as “wpa_supplicant.conf” in the sd-card drive. As in the previous step, make sure to set “Save as type” to “All files”.

Now we’re ready to actually use our newly created hard drive, make sure to eject it from windows before removing it from your sd-card slot.

Place the sd-card inside the raspberry PI card slot, and plug it to its USB power supply.

At that point you should see the green led blinking to indicate that something is happening.

Alright, we have a raspberry PI that should have booted completely, this could take up to 2 minutes for the first run.

Now we want to connect to it from our windows machine. Usually that requires knowing the IP address of the device, which is a problem here, we have no keyboard or screen to do anything!

Don’t worry there’s another way to find the raspberry pi without knowing its IP address.
The trick is to find the raspberry pi by its name, most network devices have a name to easily find them, the raspberry pi is no exception here.

If you are using windows and don’t have iTunes already installed, you will certainly need to install this software to enable discovery by name: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999?locale=en_US

Note for non windows users: Open a terminal window, and type ssh pi@raspberrypi.local then type the password: raspberrypi. Don't worry if the terminal doesn't write anything as you type your password, it's normal.

The program used to remotely control a raspberry PI is called "ssh", it’s mostly a linux thing at first, but windows can connect to ssh enabled devices too.

To use ssh on windows, you will need a software called "Putty", install and run it.

https://www.putty.org/

At the top of the window there is a Host parameter, set it to raspberrypi.local, make sure the port is 22 and the connection type is set to ssh.
Press connect, and press Yes when some sort of security alert shows up.

It will then ask you for a username, type pi, and then a password, type raspberry.

You should now be connected to your raspberry PI.