Hook up Raspberry Pi via Ethernet to laptop without router?

Question

I'm working on a balloon project with a Raspberry Pi. When we potentially recover the Raspberry Pi, it will most likely be in a rural location and I'd like to turn off the Pi at that point safely.

Without a router or network nearby, I was wondering if there is a way to hook up a Raspberry Pi with an Ethernet cable directly to a laptop?

Answer 1

It's a solution for Ubuntu (the idea also works for Windows or Mac) I just tried today and it works like a charm.

Material

1. a cross-over Ethernet cable (the name is fancy but it's just a normal Ethernet cable)
2. a laptop (ubuntu)
3. a Raspberry Pi (I have the Pi2)

Prerequisites on your ubuntu

6. Install network-manager

   $sudo apt-get install network-manager

7. Install nmap

   $sudo apt-get install nmap

Edit Wired connection on your laptop (Ubuntu)

8. Change IpV4 settings to "Share to other computers"
9. Save the setting
10. Reboot your laptop

Share WiFi connection of your laptop via Ethernet crossover cable

11. Hook up your RPi with your laptop using the Ethernet cable

12. Look up the broadcast address of the Ethernet connection (Laptop),

$/sbin/ifconfig eth1 | grep "Bcast" | awk -F: '{print $3}' | awk '{print $1}' 10.42.0.255

1. Use this address to find out the IP address of your RPi, it's 10.42.0.96 in my case because 10.42.0.1 is my laptop

   $nmap -n -sP 10.42.0.255/24

  Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2016-02-20 23:07 CET
  Nmap scan report for 10.42.0.1
  Host is up (0.00031s latency).
  Nmap scan report for 10.42.0.96
  Host is up (0.0023s latency).
  Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 2.71 seconds

2. Login to your RPi from your laptop (-Y with X-forwarding)

   $ssh -Y [email protected]

3. Lo and behold! Now your RPi is connected to your laptop and RPi can share the WiFi connection.

   pi@raspberrypi ~ $

Share display & keyboard of your laptop with RPi

4. Install vncserver on Raspberry Pi

   $ sudo apt-get update

   $ sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

5. Install vncviewer on your laptop by downloading RealVNC (it supports multiple platforms) http://www.realvnc.com/download/vnc/

6. To be able to copy & paste from VNC server <--> VNC viewer, you need to install autocutsel on your RPi.

$sudo apt-get install autocutsel

If this site doesn't work, try to download the .deb directly from a mirror site, e.g. mirror.hmc.edu/debian/pool/main/a/autocutsel/autocutsel_0.10.0-1_armhf.deb
and install it

$sudo dpkg -i autocutsel_0.10.0-1_armhf.deb

7. Start vncserver on your RPi (You have to restart vncserver after installing autocutsel, you can issue $vncserver -kill :1)

   $vncserver :1

8. Add autocutsel -fork to /home/pi/.vnc/xstartup

 #!/bin/sh
 xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey 
 autocutsel -fork
 #x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
 #x-window-manager &
 # Fix to make GNOME work 
 export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1 
 /etc/X11/Xsession

9. Start vncviewer on your laptop

   $vncviewer

10. A vncviewer window will pop up and type in the IP address of your RPi (given by your laptop) followed by port 1, which is your VNC server. for example: 10.42.0.96:1 in my case.

11. Connect it to the vncserver hosted on your RPi by typing in a password (set up a password yourself)

    12.Now you can see the desktop of RPi on your laptop, and I opened my browser to show the shared WiFi connection is working as well.

See Raspberry Pi desktop on your ubuntu