Setting up a new raspberry pi can be a bit of a pain. PiBakery makes that process *much* easier and it adds a few unexpected features that are extremely valuable!

Go to their site: www.pibakery.org and click:

You’ll be presented with the various OS options.  Hopefully you can take it from there.  Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Wifi setup without peripherals!

First, it lets you setup your wifi username and password long before the pi is setup the first time.  If you’ve never done this  before… this is great because you can skip plugging in a keyboard mouse and screen, just to enable wifi.  Instead, once the image is created, you plug in power and voila you can ssh into the raspberry pi directly.

Name your pi!

When you start having lots of PIs in action in your home.  You’ll start to want to name them to keep ’em straight.  PiBakery has a nice block for this in Settings > Set hostname to:

Simple example setup…

The above image is the script I use.  Except be sure to change the “network-name”, “network-password”, and hostname to something you’ll remember.

Once you do that, insert your flash disk into your flash writer/sleeve, and insert it into your computer.  Then click “write” on the upper right:

The process will take about 20 minutes, but when done, you can pop the disk into your PI and it will boot directly onto your wifi network.  And you should be able to find it with mDNS, as described here:

Name your PIs with mDNS – forget the IPs with ZeroConf

A start-up script that can SAVE you!

If you followed the tutorial seen here:

Raspberry PI – Run on boot, and run forever! Systemd/Systemctl

There is a chance you’ve run into reboot/watchdog reboot misery.  Specifically if your watchdog script keeps on failing, then it will keep rebooting your pi… over, and over, and over, preventing you from logging in to see what the issue is.

PiBakery has a neat script that it sets up which is accessible from a MAC which allows you to run a bash script BEFORE your service attempts to boot!  In the case of the watchdog from heck:

1. Plug in the flash disk.  It should create a mount called “boot”.
2. Navigate to:

   /PiBakery/

3. Find this script:

   /PiBakery/everyBoot.sh

   or

   /PiBakery/nextBoot.sh

4. With the editor of your choice.  Simply unregister the service with the watchdog feature like this:

   #!/bin/bash

   systemctl disable runme.service

Phew!  Next time you startup your PI, the offending service will be disabled, and it will give you a chance to remedy the situation.

Good practices made easy. (Like setting a user and password.)

There are several blocks to explore… nut one of the ones that is generally a recommended practice is to change the default username and password of the user.

There are lots of other good things in this little package – but these are the ones I most use.  Enjoy!