The Raspberry Pi Zero (Zero) is awesome. It has a 1Ghz single-core CPU, 512MB RAM, and mini HDMI all in a USB flash drive-sized package. It can, however, be more difficult to get setup than other Raspberry Pis. This guide will give you a few tips to help get your Pi up and running more quickly. It also assumes that you already have Raspbian on the Micro SD card you intend to use in the Pi. If you need help getting Raspbian installed, you can find more information here.

Setting Up Network Connections

Unlike the other Pi models, the Zero does not have ethernet. This, combined with it’s lack of full-sized USB, makes initial setup tricky. My first instinct was to connect to the Zero via SSH. Afterall, I didn’t plan to use it with a GUI or plan on needing to interact with it directly anyway. That plan fell by the wayside as soon as I realized that the Zero would not be able to connect to the network at all, without my inputing the Wi-Fi password. In short, no SSH. Unfortunately, booting it up connected to my monitor did not work either, because I could not get the Pi to power my keyboard, even with an extra power supply plugged into the MicroUSB hub.

All was not lost though. Fortunately, you can mount the MicroSD card with Raspbian already installed on it to your PC, search its directories, and create and edit files. After mounting the MicroSD card, you will need to edit two files in order to connect to your Wi-Fi: /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.