Setup Raspberry Pi Zero W

I've written previously about the setup of the raspberry pi's that I have done, which was based on the Pi 2 B, and Pi 3. This time however, we using a Pi zero w, as a streaming client for home use, and to reduce the cost of the device, we decided to use a zero w.

The interesting thing about this device is that it does not have an RJ45 ethernet port, which means you cant just connect to your modem/router at home, let it get a DHCP IP, and connect to it. Since it has wifi, you need to find a way to do that.

Here is how I did the setup, from my Linux Mint laptop.

Write raspbian image to SD card

Download whatever OS you want to use on the Pi. I used Raspbian Stretch
Insert the SD card into the card reader on your laptop, and find out where it is:

sudo fdisk -l

which came up as dev/mmcblk0

Now write the raspbian image to the SD card:

sudo dd if=2017-09-07-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress bs=4M

Configure networking

Since you cant easily connect an ethernet cable to the Pi, and let it get an IP, you need a way to get it to connect to your wifi hotspot, but that will require credentials. So you can mount the SD card, see the OS files, and modify them, so that when you put the SD card into the Pi, it has the correct config.

This and this link have more info.