Part I: Connecting Raspberry Pi to a Laptop using Wifi

Deborah Kewon

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Nov 22, 2020 · 6 min read

During this COVID-19 pandemic, my favorite activity at home is watching my fish. I love watching my clownfish rubbing his body against corals, goby sifting sand, and cleaner shrimp cleaning the rock. When I first set up my saltwater aquarium, one of my biggest concerns, was a heater. Since fish are sensitive to temperature changes, I wanted to buy a perfect heater for them. However, it wasn’t so easy (I read so many reviews about “cooked” fish!). For this reason, I decided to set up a system where I can get the water temperature of my aquarium in real-time using Raspberry Pi and Python.

In this article (Part I), I will explain how I connected my Raspberry Pi to my Mac using Wi-Fi. In the next article (Part II), I will demonstrate how I used the DS18B20 Temperature Sensor, Raspberry Pi, and Python to receive real-time water temperature data.

That being said, let’s start!

I. What We Need….

1. Raspberry Pi
2. USB C Hub * you may not need this. I had to use it because my Mac doesn’t have an SD card reader
3. SD Card
4. Raspberry Pi Power Supply

II. Download Software

• Raspberry Pi OS (https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/)

• SD Card Formatter (https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/eula_mac/index.html)

• Etcher (https://www.balena.io/etcher/)

• Angry IP Scanner (https://angryip.org/download/#mac)

• VNC Viewer (https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/viewer/)

III. Format an SD Card

Once you download all the software, insert your SD card into your computer, open your SD Card Formatter, and click “Format”. You can choose your card under “Select card” if you have multiple SD cards. I labeled mine “boot”.

Now, we are going to open balenaEtcher. Select “Flash from file” and click the zip file you downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website (“2020–08–20-raspios-buster-armhf”). Target will be your SD card. Click “Flash!”.

IV. Create “ssh” text file in your SD card

When you are done with formatting your SD card, click your SD card (in my case “boot”) and create a blank text file named “ssh”.

V. Create wpa_supplicant.conf file in your SD card

Here is the important part. We need to make sure our laptop and Raspberry Pi are in the same network. Create a text file containing the following script. Don’t forget to include your Wifi/Hotspot name and password in the script.

country=US
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev 
update_config=1
network={
       ssid="Wifi or Hotspot Name"
       psk="Wifi or Hotspot Password"
       key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    }

Once you are done, take your SD card from your laptop and insert it into your Raspberry Pi, and power your Raspberry Pi as shown below.

VI. Scan your IP Address

Windows users often use Advanced IP Scanner to scan IP address, but since I’m a Mac user, I used Angry IP Scanner.

Finding an IP address in Mac is quite easy (System Preferences → Network →TCP/IP)

Once you find your IP address, open Angry IP Scanner. Change the last digit to 1 and 254, and type them in the IP Range respectively. If everything is correctly done, you will see “raspberrypi.local” and its IP address as shown below.

VII. Access your Raspberry Pi using Terminal

Now that we have our Raspberry Pi IP address, we can access it.

Go to your terminal and paste the following script.

ssh pi@xxx.xxx.xx.xxx *your raspberry pi IP address*

Terminal will ask you for the password. The default password for Raspberry Pi is “raspberry”.

When you see “pi@raspberrypi” in green, use the following script to configure.

sudo raspi-config

Let’s enable some items. When the below screen pops up, go to “Interface Options”.

Click “P2 SSH” and enable SSH.

It is always nice to see the desktop of our Raspberry Pi — Let’s also enable VNC. With VNC viewer, we will be able to remotely access/control our Raspberry Pi.

VIII. VNC Viewer

In order to use VNC Viewer, you might need to go to “Sharing” and set a password.

System Preferences → Sharing → Computer Setting

Once you set your password, open VNC Viewer you downloaded earlier and add your Raspberry Pi IP address.

Type the password you just set.

If, in case, your VNC Viewer shows this message, go to Display Options → Resolution → DMT Mode 82. It will resolve the issue.

Welcome to Raspberry Pi!

Voila! we are finally done! Set your country, language, and timezone.

I hope this article was helpful and easy to follow. In the next article, I will explain how we can automatically save the water temperature data in a designated place using Raspberry Pi and Python.

Thank you for reading! If you like what I did, don’t hesitate to follow me on GitHub and connect with me on Linkedin.

Also, feel free to check out my other articles:

How to Get Twitter Notifications on Currency Exchange Rate: Web Scraping and Automation

Databricks: How to Save Data Frames as CSV Files on Your Local Computer

Extracting Keywords from a Text Using R Regex (Easy)

How to Create Multiple Worksheets From a List of Column Values and Delete Any Empty Columns Automatically Using R and VBA