A month and a half ago, we launched Raspberry Pi Connect, giving you simple, remote access to your Raspberry Pi straight out of the box, from anywhere in the world. Since then we’ve been listening to your thoughts on what you’d most like to see from the service: today we’re excited to announce the latest beta release, bringing Raspberry Pi Connect to even more devices.
Today’s release includes remote shell access and support for all Raspberry Pi computers, whether they’re running Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit or 64-bit, going all the way back to the 2012 Raspberry Pi 1. This includes Raspberry Pi OS Lite, as well as versions of Raspberry Pi OS with the desktop.
Remote shell access
The new remote shell feature in Raspberry Pi Connect enables you to launch a shell on your Raspberry Pi device from a web browser over a secure connection.
This provides access to your Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment, extending support to older devices as well as devices running Raspberry Pi OS Lite. Remote shell access also works much better over low-bandwidth connections than screen sharing, making it a handy option to have.
To get started with a remote shell on Raspberry Pi OS Lite, run the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install rpi-connect-liteThen, sign in using the rpi-connect command line interface:
rpi-connect signinVisit the verification URL on any device and sign in to link your Raspberry Pi with your Raspberry Pi ID.
Expanded support for Raspberry Pi devices
Starting with today’s release, version 1.2, Raspberry Pi Connect now supports all 32-bit Raspberry Pi computers, as well as 64-bit computers. All devices get remote shell out-of-the-box, and if you use a Wayland compositor, such as Wayfire, you can also share your screen. In practice, this means you can use screen sharing with Raspberry Pi 4 and later models and remote shell with all models of Raspberry Pi, even the oldest.
We hope this will make it a little bit easier for people to keep older Raspberry Pis in service doing useful stuff. Plenty of remote headless applications, for example, don’t need the performance of Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 but still benefit from straightforward remote access.
We’re looking forward to seeing how people use these new features. If you haven’t dipped your toe into the water yet, our Raspberry Pi Connect documentation has everything you need to get started.
