Earlier this year we told you all about our awesome new remote access service, Raspberry Pi Connect. We said we wanted to make it as useful as possible for our individual users, and provide it for free on Raspberry Pi devices. But we knew our industrial and embedded customers would like to use the functionality it provided, and more. Since launching Raspberry Pi Connect, we’ve been gathering information from these customers to understand what they are using it for and what they’d like to see.

Also, for all you individual users, we’ve not stopped developing the service, so read on for new functionality for you too!

Connect for Organisations

Feedback from our commercial customers shows that Connect has hit on a particular problem many of them have. When supporting their products in the field, whether that’s fifty metres up a radio transmission tower or at a customer site, it is difficult to maintain those systems when things go wrong. There are many commercial customers who have found Connect the perfect solution to this problem. But the service had a limitation: the devices are ‘owned’ by a single user, and no other users can access them. The worry one customer had, about one of their IT team disappearing with control of all their customers’ devices, was clear!

There are also situations where a customer has only a single Raspberry Pi, but wants to provide many users with access to it. Or where a school with a set of Raspberry Pis is giving each of their students access to them, so they can develop software remotely. Introducing Raspberry Pi Connect for Organisations!

Connect for Organisations allows you to create an organisation account which can own the Raspberry Pi devices registered to it:

Much like Raspberry Pi Connect for individual users, devices are added to the organisation’s account and can be controlled through the web page. To switch between your personal account and an organisation account, you can just click on the switch icon in the top left. Of course, now you have an organisation, it is going to need users:

Users can be invited into the organisation easily. Currently we’re not limiting the number of users or charging for the number of users — we don’t anticipate users per se to consume much bandwidth, storage, or processing resource, so we suspect that would be an unnecessary complication. As you can see, there are only two roles, administrator and member; only administrators can add or remove devices.

What does it cost?

We’ve kept pricing simple. Raspberry Pi Connect for Organisations costs $0.50 per device per month, based on the maximum number of devices registered in the month, and you get unlimited users.

Next up

Now that organisation functionality is available, we’ve got some other things to start working on. To give you an idea of where we’re going with Connect, some of these are:

• Device tagging: tag devices with your own labels, and use those tags to search and identify different classes of device
• Access control lists: using tags to give users different levels of access to devices
• Ability to sign devices up from Raspberry Pi Imager: boot direct to headless installation!
• Capacity for bulk provisioning of Raspberry Pi Connect device secrets during manufacture of Compute Module- and Raspberry Pi-based products

Now for the eye candy

Some of you may have noticed a new button on the screen sharing interface:

The ability to enter full-screen mode at the click of a button is great for people who want to be able to get a better view of the destination screen, making it work more obviously — a little bit of useful functionality for all Connect users. We hope you like it!

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Earlier this year we released Raspberry Pi Connect, which lets you access your Raspberry Pi from anywhere, either through a remote shell interface or by screen sharing. But perhaps, occasionally, you might need to screen share some other computer; what if you want to screen share your big PC, with its gaming graphics capabilities, around your house? Is it possible to use it to play your games from anywhere? Happily, thanks to Valve’s hugely popular Steam Link product, the answer is yes. With Steam Link, our kids can — OK, we can — play PC games on any computer in the house, without having to lug the PC around. And now, you can run Steam Link on your Raspberry Pi 5!

Steam Link is actually tackling some quite difficult challenges to enable us to play graphics-heavy games remotely. Firstly, screen sharing is not normally optimised for sending high quality images, since you have to work quite hard to keep both the bitrate and the latency down; you also don’t normally transmit audio as well as video, and you need to do a bit of magic to talk to game controllers. So the smart folks at Valve have successfully solved quite a few hard problems to bring this into being.

Even better, Sam Lantinga from Valve — who is also the developer of SDL, a simple multimedia programming library — has been working for a little while on getting Steam Link to run on Raspberry Pi 5. The previous method used to run Steam Link on Raspberry Pi OS no longer worked very well after we moved away from the closed-source Broadcom multimedia libraries, and with Wayland, a different approach was needed. Sam has been working with the Raspberry Pi software team to use our hardware in the most efficient way possible.

Valve’s announcement of Steam Link v1.3.13 shows that Sam has been able to get Steam Link working at some amazing rates on Raspberry Pi 5, including 4kp60 and even 1080p240 (obviously you’ll need a suitable monitor for that!).

To install Steam Link yourself, grab yourself an up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS image and type:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install steamlink

steamlink

Enjoy!

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