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Raspberry Pi Connect

If you’re interested in Raspberry Pi Connect, you’ll also want to read our more recent update about remote shell access and support for older Raspberry Pi devices.

Today we’re pleased to announce the beta release of Raspberry Pi Connect: a secure and easy-to-use way to access your Raspberry Pi remotely, from anywhere on the planet, using just a web browser.

It’s often extremely useful to be able to access your Raspberry Pi’s desktop remotely. There are a number of technologies that can be used to do this, including VNC and, of course, the X protocol itself. But they can be challenging to configure, particularly when you are attempting to access a machine on a different local network; and of course, with the transition to Wayland in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, classic X remote desktop support is no longer available.

We wanted to be able to provide you with this functionality with our usual “it just works” approach. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect.

Raspberry Pi Connect

How do I get Raspberry Pi Connect?

First of all, Raspberry Pi Connect needs your Raspberry Pi to be running a 64-bit distribution of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm that uses the Wayland window server. This in turn means that, for now, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 4, or Raspberry Pi 400.

Assuming you’re using one of these models, make sure you have the latest Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm from Raspberry Pi Imager, open a terminal, and enter:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install rpi-connect

Now reboot your Raspberry Pi, and you’ll find a new icon in your system tray at the top right of your screen. Click this icon and choose “Sign in” to get started. Hopefully, you’ll find the instructions simple enough to follow, but if you need it, there’s extra documentation that covers known limitations during the beta.

Reboot your Raspberry Pi

What happens under the hood?

I asked Paul Mucur, who runs web development at Raspberry Pi, to explain how the underlying technology works:

When you use Raspberry Pi Connect from a web browser to connect to your Raspberry Pi device, we establish a secure peer-to-peer connection between the two using WebRTC—the same real-time communication technology that underlies the in-browser clients for Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.

Our “rpi-connect” daemon for Raspberry Pi OS is responsible for listening out for new screen-sharing sessions from the Raspberry Pi Connect website and negotiating the best possible (i.e., lowest latency) connection between the in-browser VNC client and a VNC server running on your device. In general, once a connection is established, no traffic needs to pass through our servers.

If for any reason it is not possible to establish a direct connection between your browser and Raspberry Pi device, rpi-connect, and your browser may instead opt to securely relay traffic through our servers, encrypting it with DTLS.

Peer-to-peer and relayed connections

At the moment, the Raspberry Pi Connect service has just a single relay (TURN) server, located in the UK. This means that if rpi-connect chooses to relay traffic, the latency can be quite high. Hovering over the padlock icon in your browser while connected will reveal whether your connection is being relayed or not, so you can tell whether changes to your networking setup might improve connectivity.

We intend that Raspberry Pi Connect will remain free (as in beer) for individual users with non-relayed connections, with no limit on the number of devices. We don’t yet know how many people will need to relay their traffic through our TURN servers; we’ll keep an eye on the use of bandwidth and decide how to treat these connections in the future.

As I said at the beginning, Raspberry Pi Connect is in beta at the moment, so please bear in mind that you might come across the occasional limitation or imperfection. We think lots of people will find it useful, and we hope you like the sound of it enough to follow the instructions above or in the Connect documentation to install it and try it out. You can tell us what you think in the comments.

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