Via DavidMaitland.me
So last Thursday (26th Nov 2015) the Raspberry Pi Zero was announced and made available that very day. Basically the Zero is a small and ultra cheap (£4) fully functioning Raspberry Pi, but it doesn’t have any native networking and has only one USB port (which you need an OTG adapter to use).
In the UK I was lucky enough to be able to order two Pi Zero’s and have them delivered the next day. The only problem was I didn’t have an HDMI monitor or a USB hub to connect a keyboard and a WiFi adapter at the same time. My intended use for the Zero’s is for them to be little headless Linux boxes that I can put into various electronic projects and program them over WiFi (Think IoT), so I didn’t want to mess around with HDMI and GUI interfaces.
So here is a little guide showing you how to setup a Raspberry Pi Zero without an HDMI monitor or a keyboard / mouse. We will just use a USB WiFi adapter (connected to the OTG USB port) and a Linux machine to do the setup. If you don’t have a Linux machine available, you could even use another Rasberry Pi with a card reader to set this up.
This should be possible to do on other platforms as well but you will need to be able to mount an Ext4 partition natively.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!