Connecting Raspberry Pi 3B Board to System76 Laptop

Development Boards Raspberry Pi
1

Hello,

I’d like some help if possible with a class project whereby I’m connecting a Raspberry Pi 3B board with a microSD card that had a Buildroot image flashed onto it. After connecting the board to my system76 laptop, I was expecting some window to come up, but nothing happened even after a few minutes. Can you please suggest for me some options to try to fix this issue? Is there a workshop or some ongoing activity where I can get some help for this particular roadblock?

Regards,
Anshu Reddy

2

Use their image https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ and flasher and try again

Also ensure you’re using an adequate power supply (at least 12.5w mean-well)

3

How are ypu connecting the pi to your laptop and what are the results you’re expecting?

4

Initially, I was trying the wireless connection after flashing the image onto a microSD card. The image was built via Buildroot for my class project. In this configuration, I used a microUSB cable to power up the board. I wasn’t able to ssh using the wireless connection. I thought the issue may be attributed to some issue with the router in my house, so I looked for an alternative.

I then changed the configuration to an wired ethernet connection, but I didn’t have a wired ethernet port on my System76 laptop (running on Pop-OS Linux). Hence, I used an Ethernet to USB converter to connect to another port on my laptop. I’m still not able to ssh to the board.

In both configurations, I see the red light on the Raspberry Pi 3B board which I’m assuming that sufficient power is available.

5

An additional question I have is the following:

How can I get the IP address of the Raspberry Pi 3B board so that I can either ping/ssh to it? If you want to see the summary of my class project, here is the link:

6

I forgot to mention one thing:

In order to isolate if it’s the image I built that’s the problem, I have been using RaspberryPi Imager to flash the image onto my microSD card for the wireless configuration I mentioned previously.

7

Try plugging a monitor, keyboard and mouse into the pi, then login and setup networking and SSH. Once you’ve done that you should be ok.

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8

Hello,

I want to thank you for helping me out.

What you said reinforced something that I was speculating about before.

I finally got what you were saying and treated the board as a computer system.

I hooked up the keyboard, mouse, and monitor via HDMI cable to the RPi 3B board directly and just used the laptop/USB connection as a glorified power supply.

I initially tried the standalone RPi image via Imager which led to the system booting and could see the desktop screen clearly. I could open a console window and find out about the host name for the board. Then, I loaded the buildroot image and that also booted up in a manner similar to QEMU, and I could execute basic Linux commands.

I can now make further progress at this stage. For practicality, I intend to get a separate mouse, keyboard, monitor, and power supply for each Raspberry Pi board (client and server). My system76 laptop would serve to just build the Buildroot images for each board.

In the long run, I would like to figure out how to open a console on my system76 laptop and see the Raspberry Pi execution reflected in the console. For the current project though, this is not necessary, and I’ll just stick to the setup I mentioned above for each Raspberry Pi board.

Thanks again.

Regards,
Anshu

1 Like
9

Good work!