Headless Raspberry Pi 4 with 3.5inch RPi Display

Even though it sounds contradictory, one needs to configure a headless raspberry pi in order to make use of these type of display without a HDMI cable or connector(or even an external screen) laying around. We will follow official RasPi sources to configure the SSH and wifi connection. By default, SSH is not available on raspberry pi. To make it available:

  • add an empty file without an extension named ‘ssh’ to /boot

Now we will add the wifi connection. If you have an ethernet cable together with a switch that you can connect your host, this part is not necessary.

  • create a file named wpa_supplicant.confand inside of it fill:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<Insert 2 letter ISO 3166-1 country code here>

network={
 ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
 psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}
  • country code can be find in wikipedia. For example, for Germany, it is DE. For example, if your wifi name is Berliner_Kindl and your password is bier. Than conf file should look like this:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=DE

network={
 ssid="Berliner_Kindl"
 psk="bier"
}
  • Now we need to insert the SD Card to raspberry and wait for it to connect to wifi network(around 5min). One can check from the modem’s connection page and under DHCP Clients List. I would like to add nmap method to here also but I can not make it work again these days…
  • Install nmap fwith the command:
$ sudo apt-get install nmap
  • check the ip address of your device with command:
$ ip a
  • This should give you an address like 123.00.0.00. Than use this command to map all the devices connected to your network:
$ nmap -sP 123.00.0.00/24
  • This will sometimes give a list of ip address together with names, but sometimes not. I believe this depends on the network settings. In case, nmap can not resolve the request than you can try to list the ips before connecting the raspberry pi and after connecting it.

After you get the ip, now it is time to connect to the raspberry pi. Write this on terminal of your host computer(of course changing to ip address of raspberry pi):

$ ssh pi@123.00.0.00
  • The default username is pi and default password is raspberry. Probably, it is a good idea to change this after log in.

Now it is time to configure the RPi 3.5inch display. Write this commands on your raspberry pi SSH window:

sudo rm -rf LCD-show
git clone https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show.git
chmod -R 755 LCD-show
cd LCD-show/
sudo ./LCD35-show

To calibrate the screen, follow the code down:

cd LCD-show/
sudo dpkg -i -B xinput-calibrator_0.7.5-1_armhf.deb

I would like to install OBS on Raspberry Pi but it is not supported by default unfortunately. I would like to build following this and this pages to see if it is possible. Having a higher memory and better cooling option seems to be a must.