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SSH into Raspberry Pi through USB

  1. Edit the image: To access the Pi Zero over USB you have to edit the image first.

    • If you have the SD card in your Pi Zero, power it down and remove it
    • Put the SD card in an adapter and plug it into your computer
    • On a Mac the SD card should appear on your desktop
    • Open the SD card icon to explore the contents

  2. Access the micro SD card from the command line.

    In the command line enter the following command:

    ls -ls /Volumes/

    You should see something like this:

    total 13
8 lrwxr-xr-x  1 root   admin     1 Jul 28 09:41 Macintosh HD -> /
5 drwxrwxrwx@ 1 mitch  staff  2560 Jul 28 11:47 boot

    The volume named boot should be the SD card with the Raspbian image on it.

  3. Enable SSH: There was a security update to the Raspbian images. Now to enable ssh by default you have to do the following:

    touch /Volumes/boot/ssh

    This will write an empty file to the root of your Raspbian image. That will enable ssh on startup.

  4. Edit config.txt

    • In the root folder of the SD card, open config.txt (/Volumes/boot/config.txt) in a text editor.

    • Append this line to the bottom of it:

      dtoverlay=dwc2

    • Save the file

  5. Edit cmdline.txt

    • In the root folder of the SD card, open cmdline.txt (/Volumes/boot/cmdline.txt) in a text editor

    • After rootwait, append this text leaving only one space between rootwait and the new text (otherwise it might not be parsed correctly):

      modules-load=dwc2,g_ether

    • If there was any text after the new text make sure that there is only one space between that text and the new text.

    • Save the file

  6. Boot the Pi

    • Give the Pi plenty of time to bootup (can take as much as 90 seconds or more)
    • You can monitor the RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget status in the System Preferences / Network panel (note that the IP address listed is not the host)

  7. Login over USB

    • If this is not the first time connecting to your raspberry pi, refresh the SSH key by typing the command: 

      ssh-keygen -R <hostname>.local

      If this is the first time connecting to the Pi, you won't need to run this command.

    • Connect to the Pi:

      ssh <username>@<hostname>.local