Raspberry Pi Connect gains wide release, brings support to all Pi SBCs

If you’re a frequent visitor to XDA, you’ll know that we love seeing SBC projects that really let creators’ talents shine. Of course, in order to come up with some of these great projects, you often only need a little imagination and some programming skills. But for the most part, it’s still possible to get things done thanks to the support of a deep online community and powerful feature-packed SBCs.

The Raspberry Pi is perhaps one of the most well-known SBCs, with the brand offering a variety of different options, and as you might expect, the support for Pi is pretty strong, with the brand often making direct improvements to its boards with various software updates. The brand recently launched Raspberry Pi Connect, giving users an easy way to remotely connect to their Pi devices.

Like with any release, there were some limitations at first, as the software would only work on the Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 4, and Raspberry Pi 400. Furthermore, those aforementioned boards needed to run a 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. So, not everyone had access to this awesome new feature. But now, things are changing, with an update that will allow this software to run on all versions of Pi boards running 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Raspberry Pi OS.

Connect arrives to all Pi boards

As you can imagine, the new development is big news, especially if you’re the owner of an older Raspberry Pi board. The brand clarifies that Raspberry Pi Connect will give board owners remote shell access, which can be used to connect remotely without having a desktop environment. Naturally, this will be a secure connection, so validating some credentials will be a necessary step.

What’s cool is that this will be a part of the OS, so you won’t have to set up any additional tools to get things working. The brand does state that if “you use a Wayland compositor, such as Wayfire, you can also share your screen,” which is great if you have a newer version of a Raspberry Pi board. Naturally, if this is your first time digging into all of this, there’s documentation ready to help you get started.

While this is a great way to refresh the experience of older Pi models, it’s also an excellent way to potentially get more things done. And what’s even cooler is that this is just the beginning, so there could be more improvements to the service as time passes.

Raspberry Pi CTO Gordon Hollingworth was in the comments of the news post, sharing that there’s a long list of things that can be added to Connect that will make it more useful. Naturally, some things will take priority, but it appears that file transfers could be on the top of that list and could make it into a future update.