The last thing we need to do to prepare the microSD card is to create a “wpa_nf” file on the card. Pretty nifty! Create a “wpa_nf” File on the MicroSD Card to Enable WiFi Adding this line will enable the UART on the GPIO pins so you can complete the rest of the process without having to hook your Pi Zero W up to a monitor and keyboard. That would comment it out, causing it to be ignored. Note: Despite the presence of a hash (‘#’) in front of the other lines in this file, you must not put one in front of this line. Open the file “config.txt” in your favorite text editor (i.e. Notepad++, TextWrangler, ConTEXT Editor, etc.) and add this line to the very end: Here’s a list of all the files in the directory of interest. In Linux, the card will be mounted, and you’ll have to navigate to the “Boot” directory on the card to find the file we’re looking for. On a Windows or Macintosh, the files will be loaded in the root directory of the microSD card, so when you open a window of the drive, you’ll see them directly. This file will be visible from any operating system, although on a Linux system it’s in a slightly different location. To continue, we’re going to need to edit a file on the microSD card. Edit the “config.txt” File on the MicroSD Card Once complete, the window will display a “Flash Complete!” message.īy default, Etcher “ejects” the card after it has created the image, so you’ll need to pull it out and reinsert it to get your computer to reload the disk. This is another long-ish process, requiring several minutes to complete. Then select the image you downloaded earlier, the drive you want to install to (Etcher won’t let you install to anything but a removable drive, and if only one drive is available, it will select it automatically!), and click “Flash!” Simply download and install it to your computer. To write the image to the card, there exists an excellent utility for Mac/Linux/Windows called Etcher. Note that XYZ is a placeholder for the release name of the distribution at the time of this writing, that name is “Stretch”.

Note: Make sure that you don’t download “RASPBIAN XYZ LITE”, as the Lite installation is lacking several utilities and programs we’ll need to get things moving.

Raspberry zero camera setup