The purpose of this post is to share a tool that enables a Raspberry Pi to automatically connect to WiFi, login with secure credentials, and email its IP address for SSHing. We developed this tool through my academic lab and are sharing it to help others. It’ll even broadcast its own access point network if there are no known WiFi networks in range. It was developed for robotics applications but would work well for any remote deployment use of the RPi (i.e. without a keyboard / monitor). Once forked, the tool can generate the OS image for an RPi that works out of the box. The image will be an artifact from the build that can be downloaded and flashed.

The documentation describes how to use the tool, but you have to fork the repo, create secrets, and run a workflow from the Actions tab. This will prompt a dialog box where you can enter the specifics of your image (OS, host name, access point SSID, etc).

The tool builds the latest RPi image in the cloud, and enables automatic installation of Python packages. As is, it currently installs packages related to robotics research. The workflow can be customized after forking the repo, if desired.

It works for the RPi 4 and RPi 5, and can support 32 and 64-bit versions of Raspbian. It also enables Ubuntu.

The WiFi utility is able to login with secure credentials via enterprise networks.

The tool is open access, so please share far and wide. This is the result of >1k hours of development from the University of Michigan, funded by the NSF.