You need to setup your pi to be able to start your projects. In the following tutorial I show you how to initialize your SD card with the latest Raspbian operating system and boot up your pi headlessly for the first time.

A headless setup is one where you do not need an external monitor, mouse or keyboard. All you need to complete this tutorial is your Raspberry Pi, a micro SD card and adapter, and a RJ-45 Ethernet cable. A headless setup really unleashes the potential of the Raspberry Pi, allowing you to setup a remote system to perform functions that can be updated from the comfort of your home computer.

My tutorials have been updated to reflect the security changes of Raspbian November 2016. Prior to this operating system, SSH was enabled by default. Many were unaware of this and in the spirit of IoT, hosted their Pis on public networks. Of course, SSH was possible with the default username and password: pi and raspberry. The Raspberry Pi Foundation saw this as an issue and updated the new OS to close this backdoor. Now for those of us interested in headless connections have to enable SSH connections, and show you how to in these tutorials!

I have created a separate tutorial for both Windows and Mac operating systems. If you are trying to setup a Pi headlessly from a Linux computer, follow the Mac instructions.