Raspberry Pi Connect Leaves Beta, Gains Increased Efficiency for Secure Remote Connectivity
First non-beta release comes with better-behaved sleep functionality to boost power efficiency, and lower-bandwidth "heartbeat" packets.
Raspberry Pi has announced that its Raspberry Pi Connect service, designed to provide secure yet simple remote access to users' single-board computers, has now left beta — and comes with more efficient connectivity.
"It’s been just over a year since we launched the Raspberry Pi Connect beta, giving you simple, remote access to your Raspberry Pi straight out of the box, from anywhere in the world," says Raspberry Pi's Chris Lowder of the service. "The response from users has been fantastic, and we rapidly reached an install base of over 100,000 devices. Today we're excited to announce that following the recent release of version 2.5, we're dropping the 'beta.'"
The company launched Raspberry Pi Connect in beta back in May last year, partly to address compatibility problems between the Wayland-based desktop of the latest Raspberry Pi OS but mostly to make it easier to both set up a machine for remote connectivity and keep it secure — something that can be an issue with basic port forwarding, even assuming a user's internet connection includes a public-facing IP address.
Raspberry Pi connect solved these problems by offering a secure portal listing all Raspberry Pi devices linked to a user's account, then providing a remote desktop session directly in-browser. A few months after launch the service was extended to also include a Secure Shell (SSH)-style command-line interface, compatible with older devices and those running headless with no desktop environment.
In Raspberry Pi Connect 2.5, the first non-beta release, the software gains improved connectivity efficiency: devices no longer frequently wake to send keep-alive packets to Raspberry Pi's servers, but instead sit quietly on a long-lived HTTP connection until remotely woken. The "heartbeat" status message frequency has also been tweaked, reducing the number of repeated messages, while compression has been enabled to reduce the size of each message.
The new release is now available to all Raspberry Pi OS users, via sudo apt update && sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connect; those running Raspberry Pi Connect Lite should instead run sudo apt update && sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connect-lite. Instructions on using the tool can be found on the Raspberry Pi website.