In my last post I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Monitor and how it is a great solution for working with your Raspberry Pi. However, as great as the Pi Monitor is sometimes it is a bit of overkill or too big to carry around which got me to thinking about other ways to access you Pi.
Why would you want to choose one of the following? Well, they require little or no extra hardware, are cheap to implement and run, and have the added benefit of the possibility of remote access.
Here are three other methods which you might like to consider as alternatives to a monitor: video capture card, VNC and SSH.
Video Capture Card
I’ve started with the one that is probably least known – the video capture card (VCC). This is a tiny USB unit about the size of a memory stick that takes the video output from an HDMI device and allows it to be shown on another device. Typically used by gamers to stream their activities online, but it also works for the humble Pi. VCC devices are easily available and I picked up one on Aliexpress for £3.
You plug your Raspberry Pi into the HDMI socket on the VCC, and then plug it into your computer. In order to see the output, you need a piece of third-party software. I used the open source Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) which can both record and stream the output although I just used it as a viewer.
In use, I was surprised at just how well such a cheap device could reproduce the screen of my Pi. The issue was that it still required an external keyboard and mouse to be connected to the Pi, and it was very laggy when moving the mouse, which made it almost impossible to use. If you are a keyboard whizz or maybe just running the command line, then this will be fine, but otherwise, this is probably not the solution you are looking for.
VNC
VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a tried and tested solution for accessing and operating remote machines including the Raspberry Pi. Unlike VCC above, which works out of the box, VNC requires a small piece of software to be installed on both the Raspberry Pi (the server) and the machine you are operating the Pi from (the viewer or client). Fortunately Raspberry Pi comes with VNC baked in and all you need to do is go to the Interfaces table of the Configuration app and toggle it on.
Once enabled you can open the viewer on your client machine and enter the IP address of your remote machine (the Pi) and you should be good to go. While you can access your machine from outside of your network with some port forwarding on your router I would think twice about doing that due to the security implications.
Where VNC wins out over VCC is in that you don’t require an external keyboard and mouse as the keyboard strokes and mouse movements from your client machine are sent through and replicated on your server, the Pi. By and large, this doesn’t suffer from laggy movement in the same way VCC does.
SSH
The final solution is to use SSH (Secure Shell) which is most suitable for command line work. If you have never used command line before it can be pretty intimidating on first use but is incredibly powerful and I actually prefer it for most server based tasks.
Like VNC, it needs to be enabled either in Raspberry Pi Configuration if you have a connection to a monitor, or it is possible to do it without using a host machine. Once enabled on your client machine you can open a terminal session and connect to the remote Pi by doing something similar to the following:
ssh pi@<ip address>
Security can be extended by adding keys but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
Conclusion
In this post I have explored three alternative ways to connect to your Pi without the need for a monitor. You may, of course, use some combination of all of them at some point depending on your use case.