DEV Community: Oza Parth

Day 2 — It Just… Worked

Oza Parth — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:03:04 +0000

Turns out I was solving the wrong problem the whole time.

Yesterday I ended on a cliffhanger: redo everything from scratch, and if that fails, drag a TV over and read the IP off the screen like it’s 2015.I never even got to the TV.

Before pulling out cables, I did one more search — half out of habit, half out of desperation — for a better way to talk to a Pi Zero without knowing its IP. And that’s when I found it: Raspberry Pi Connect, the official remote access tool straight from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The idea is almost embarrassingly simple compared to everything I put myself through yesterday. The Pi makes an outgoing connection to Raspberry Pi’s own relay servers — so there’s nothing to open on my router, nothing to configure, and critically, nothing for me to hunt down. You sign in with a free Raspberry Pi ID, link the device once, and after that you just open a browser and connect to it from connect.raspberrypi.com. No local IP. No raspberrypi.local gamble. No scanner app pretending to help.

I installed it, signed in, and linked the Pi.And it connected. First try. No drama.

I sat there for a second just… waiting for it to fail, honestly. After yesterday, I didn’t trust anything to work on the first attempt. But there it was — a terminal, live, talking to the same Pi Zero that spent an entire day pretending not to exist on my network.

The funniest part is realizing I never actually had a Wi-Fi problem or an SSH problem yesterday. I had an IP problem — and the fix was a tool designed specifically to make IP addresses irrelevant. All that pinging, all that scanning, all that “old school” detective work, and the real answer was one apt install away.

Lesson noted: sometimes the fix isn’t trying harder at the same approach — it’s stepping back and asking if there’s a completely different tool for the job.

With the Pi finally reachable, I didn’t do much else today. I mostly just poked around — checked it was actually the right board, ran a couple of basic commands, made sure the connection held. Nothing exciting to report yet. But after Day 1, “boring and it worked” feels like a win.

What’s next: now that I can actually reach the Pi Zero reliably, Day 3 is where the real fun starts — figuring out what to actually build with it.

Smooth day. I’ll take it.

Day 1 — The Pi Zero That Wouldn’t Say Hello

Oza Parth — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:56:58 +0000

Re-flashing, Wi-Fi configs, and an IP address that refuses to exist.

Status: 🔄 In Progress — still refuses to wake up.

Yesterday I said I didn’t know where to start. Today I picked one.

I looked at everything in the box — the ESP32-CAM, the NodeMCU, the motors — and settled on the Raspberry Pi Zero. No particular strategy behind it. It just felt like the right first board to wake up.

And here’s the funny part: this wasn’t even the first time.

I’d actually configured this Pi Zero before. At some point, in some previous burst of motivation, I’d set it up, gotten it running, probably even SSH’d into it successfully. And then — nothing. It went quiet, got put away, and along with it, every detail I needed to talk to it again. No idea what IP it had. No idea if SSH was even still enabled. Just a Pi Zero that used to work, sitting there like a stranger.

So today wasn’t really “starting.” It was starting over.

I wrote a fresh OS image to the SD card, this time being deliberate about it instead of hoping it would just work. Added the Wi-Fi credentials directly into the config so it would connect to my network on boot. Dropped in the empty ssh file so SSH would be enabled from the first boot, no monitor or keyboard required — the classic headless setup move.

Card back in. Power on. Wait for the lights to settle. Feels like it should just work now, right?

This is where the day fell apart.
I tried pinging the IP I expected it to grab. Nothing. I tried raspberrypi.local, the old reliable hostname trick that's supposed to work on mDNS. Nothing. I downloaded one of those IP-finder / network scanner apps to sweep the whole subnet and see what showed up. Scanned. Rescanned. Nothing that looked like my Pi.

I went through basically every “old school” trick I could think of — checking the boot config text file line by line, double-checking the SSH flag was actually there and not just something I thought I’d added, trying to ping localhost just to sanity-check my own network was behaving. Every step technically worked. The one thing that mattered — actually reaching the Pi — didn’t.

So Day 1 ends exactly where I said it might: staring at a terminal, no connection, no clear reason why.

And honestly? This is exactly the kind of day I said I wanted to document. Not the polished “and then it worked!” tutorial moment — the actual in-between part, where you’ve done everything that’s supposed to work and it just… doesn’t yet.

What I’m carrying into Day 2:

The plan is simple. Go back and redo every step, carefully, from the top — re-check the SD card, the Wi-Fi config, the SSH file, all of it — just in case I missed something small the first time around.

And if that still doesn’t work? Plan B: hook the Pi Zero straight up to a TV with an HDMI cable, boot it up, and just read the IP address off the screen directly. No more guessing, no more scanning, no more hoping raspberrypi.local decides to cooperate. Once I have the actual IP, I connect to it from my laptop and go from there.

Fingers crossed that’s the one that finally works.

No robot today. No camera stream. Just a small board somewhere on my network, refusing to say hello.

Day 0 — An Embedded Story Begins

Oza Parth — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:47:05 +0000

Beyond the Tutorials: Embracing real hardware, inevitable mistakes, and building from scratch.

Let’s Start Something…

This is not going to be another story about the latest tech gadget or a futuristic technology that may arrive someday.

This story is about something much simpler: How do we actually build things with the technology we already have?

We all know that computers have come a long way. From the earliest computers to microprocessors and microcontrollers, technology has completely changed the way we interact with the world.

But I don’t want to go back and discuss the entire history of computing.

Instead, I want to start from where we are today.

And for me, that starting point is sitting inside a box.

An ESP32-CAM. An ESP32Node MCU. A Raspberry Pi Zero. A few servo motors. Some DC motors. A laptop. And, of course, a little bit of free time stolen from boring office hours. 😄

And here is the funny part.

I didn’t buy these things without a plan.

Every time I bought a new piece of hardware, I had a project in my mind.

“I’ll build a small robot with this.” “I’ll make a camera-based system.” “I’ll connect this motor and create something cool.” “I’ll finally start that embedded project I’ve been thinking about.”

The ideas were always there. The excitement was there. The hardware was there.

But somehow, the project never happened.

The hardware went into a box. The box went onto a shelf. And the great project I had imagined slowly became another thing I would build “someday.”

Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing — a board bought with big plans, still sitting untouched because life got in the way.

So now I have a different question.

What if I just start?

I don’t have a clear idea what I’m going to build.

Should I start by learning the programming fundamentals? Should I directly start writing code? Should I ask AI: “Hey, can you make this project for me?” Or should I simply copy some code from the internet, upload it to the ESP32, and see what happens?
And honestly, I think I’m not the only one stuck at this exact starting line.

So I thought: why not change that?
Instead of waiting for the “perfect project idea,” I’m going to start experimenting.
Every day, I’ll try to build something.
Sometimes it may work. Sometimes it may fail. Sometimes I may understand exactly what is happening. And sometimes I may stare at the serial monitor wondering: “Why isn’t this damn thing working?” 😅

And that’s actually the point.
I don’t want this series to be a collection of perfect tutorials where everything works on the first attempt. I want to document the real embedded engineering journey.

The experiments. The debugging. The mistakes. The hardware failures. The strange compiler errors. The unexpected behavior. And the small moments when something finally works.

Maybe I’ll discover something new. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe we’ll both break something.
But that’s okay. Every embedded engineer has to start somewhere.

So this is Day 0.

I have the hardware. I have a laptop. I have some ideas. And I have absolutely no idea where this journey will end.
Let’s find out. Welcome to my Embedded Story.
Have you ever bought hardware with big plans only to leave it sitting in a box? Tell me your story in the comments!