Raspberry Pi on the Go

Some­times you are on the go and would like to play around with your Rasp­ber­ry Pi. I am using a quite easy set­up with my Mac­Book Air.

Power

To pow­er the RPi I am using a stan­dard USB‑A to micro USB cable con­nect­ed to one of the USB ports on the note­book. It is strong enough to pow­er the RPi.

Console Access

One pos­si­bil­i­ty would be to get a stan­dard USB to ser­i­al inter­face, oper­at­ing at 3.3 V and hook it up to the UARTs of the RPi to get a ser­i­al con­sole. This is one per­fect solu­tion as long as you do not want to use the RPi’s UART for some­thing else. Then you need to recon­fig­ure two oth­er pins, etc.

I am using a dif­fer­ent approach: I a using a thun­der­bolt to eth­er­net adapter and con­nect the RPi to the mac with a short net­work­ing cable. As the net­work is con­fig­ured to use DHCP I need to start a DHCP serv­er on the mac. The eas­i­est way is to use inter­net shar­ing in macOS. Just enable it in pref­er­ences and take a look at the ifcon­fig in the ter­mi­nal to get the router’s IPv4 address. Usu­al­ly the RPi has the same net­work but the last octet is 2. Mean­ing when the mac has the IP adress 192.168.1.1 the RPi would have 192.168.1.2. Then just use plain SSH to con­nect to the RPi.