Raspberry Pi Connect: remote desktop for your Pi

Today we're pleased to announce the beta release of Raspberry Pi Connect: a secure and easy-to-use way to access your Raspberry Pi remotely, from anywhere on the planet, using just a web browser.

It's often extremely useful to be able to access your Raspberry Pi's desktop remotely. There are a number of technologies which can be used to do this, including VNC, and of course the X protocol itself. But they can be hard to configure, particularly when you are attempting to access a machine on a different local network; and of course with the transition to Wayland in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, classic X remote desktop support is no longer available.

We wanted to be able to provide you with this functionality with our usual it just works" approach. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect.

Gordon Hollingworth

Pi Connect uses WebRTC, and a daemon running on your Pi listens for incoming screensharing requests from the Raspberry Pi website to connect the VNC server on your Pi to the VNC client running in your browser. The service is in beta, it's free, but the one major downside is that for now, there's only one TURN server for this service, located in the UK, but they might set up more of them if demand is high enough.

If you want to try this service on your own Pi running Raspberry Pi OS, you're going to need to be using a Raspberry Pi 5, 4, or 400, using the latest version of the operating system running Wayland. Update your operating system, install the rpi-connect package, reboot, and you're good to go.