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.
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