Remote control your Raspberry Pi from your PC with VNC!

If you use raspberry pi regulargly, you may have already needed to use the graphical interface of the raspberry pi without having monitor available. It is a classic problem, and always annoying.
Today we will see how to use VNC to control your raspberry pi from another computer, so you can use your raspberry pi without screen!

For schools and individuals that need to use the full desktop for certain applications (Scratch, creating your own graphical interface, etc.), using a VNC client to access your Raspberry Pi might be the way to go.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical screen updates back in the other direction, over a network.

When using VNC, two different parts of the software are used.
The first part is the VNC server. This one is installed on the machine we want to take control of (here the raspberry pi), and it will allow the connection and the control by the client part.
The second part is therefore the VNC client. It is installed on the machine from which you wish to control the server and it will allow to translate your actions into operations comprehensible by the server which will then control the remote machine from your computer.

Enable the VNC server on your Raspberry Pi

Connect to the raspberry pi in SSH, if you do not know how to, follow our tutorial How To Use Raspberry pi in a truely headless mode

Once you connect SSH to raspberry pi, we will be able to activate the VNC server which is installed by default on Raspbian. you just need to run the command sudo raspi-config, select the line Interfacing Options, then line VNC, and finally answer that you want to enable VNC.

Remote control your Raspberry Pi from your PC with VNC!

By default, pi uses the RealVNC server, which is configured to use a login mode based on user accounts on the machine. The only problem is that this connection method is not supported by all VNC clients. We will have to install a compatible client, the RealVNC client.

To install the RealVNC client on your computer, go to the official download page of RealVNC Viewer, download and install the version corresponding to your operating system.

Once you have installed RealVNC viewer, you only have to launch it and connect to the IP address of the Raspberry Pi, the default identifiers are those of the account pi.

You may like also:

• How To Use Raspberry pi in a truely headless mode
• Best OS for Raspberry Pi
• Setting up a Raspberry Pi headless